Dangerous Creole Liaisons

Jacqueline Couti

Liverpool University Press

Contrary to many studies that concentrate on Martinican and Guadeloupean literatures from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Dangerous Creole Liaisons not only exposes readers to a less familiar historical period of the French Caribbean, it features literary works from the nineteenth century, when the current ideas of modern nationhood began to coalesce. Couti offers a particularly fascinating account of Martinique and its political life under the Third Republic.
This book is one of the rare studies which examines nineteenth literature from Martinique and Guadeloupe while stressing the continuity between colonial and post-colonial periods. Couti portrays a more precise historiography of notions of self, gender, race and ethnicity as social and national constructs, which present the (Creole) body as a reflection of colonial and postcolonial societies from the nineteenth century to the present day. Hence, this monograph fills gaps and underscores the effect of little-known periods and writers on the development of French Caribbean literature and selfhood.
Couti exposes disparities concerning the emergence and nature of French Caribbean literature and the ways it defines Creole culture. For instance, contrary to popular belief, the Martinican elite of color was already interested in the promotion of its Creole identity in the nineteenth century.

Dangerous Creole Liaisons

Jacqueline Couti

Liverpool University Press

Description

Dangerous Creole Liaisons explores a French Caribbean context to broaden discussions of sexuality, nation building, and colonialism in the Americas. Couti examines how white Creoles perceived their contributions to French nationalism through the course of the nineteenth century as they portrayed sexualized female bodies and sexual and racial difference to advance their political ideologies. Questioning their exhilarating exoticism and titillating eroticism underscores the ambiguous celebration of the Creole woman as both seductress and an object of lust. She embodies the Caribbean as a space of desire and a political site of contest that reflects colonial, slave and post-slave societies. The under-researched white Creole writers and non-Caribbean authors (such as Lafcadio Hearn) who traveled to and wrote about these islands offer an intriguing gendering and sexualization of colonial and nationalist discourses. Their use of the floating motif of the female body as the nation exposes a cultural cross-pollination, an intense dialogue of political identity between continental France and her Caribbean colonies. Couti suggests that this cross-pollination still persists. Eventually, representations of Creole women's bodies (white and black) bring two competing conceptions of nationalism into play: a local, bounded, French nationalism against a transatlantic and more fluid nationalism that included the Antilles in a "greater France".

Dangerous Creole Liaisons

Jacqueline Couti

Liverpool University Press

Introduction Chercher la femme: Traces of an Ever-Present Absence
1. The (White) Female Creole Body: Bearer of Culture and Cultural Signifier
2. Falling from Grace: Creole Gothic, Flawed Femininity, and The Collapse of Civilization
Coda I (Re)writing History: Revival of the Declining Creole Nation and Transatlantic Ties
3. Sexualizing and Darkening Black Female Bodies: Whose Imagined Community?
4. Colonial Democracy and Fin de Siècle Martinique: The Third Republic and White Creole Dissent
Coda II Heritage and Legacies
Glossary
Bibliography

Dangerous Creole Liaisons

Jacqueline Couti

Liverpool University Press

Author Information

Jacqueline Couti is Assistant Professor, French and Francophone Studies at the University of Kentucky.

Dangerous Creole Liaisons

Jacqueline Couti

Liverpool University Press

Reviews and Awards

"Jacqueline Couti's important book Dangerous Creole Liaisons demonstrates that while a politically turbulent nineteenth-century France was defining itself, in turns, as an empire, a monarchy, and a republic, a corpus of writers in Martinique, mainly white and heretofore little-known, was producing texts that both dialogued with and opposed the prevailing French discourses of nationhood. In doing so, her study counters the received notion that Aimé Césaire (followed by Frantz Fanon, Edouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant) was the inaugurator of a distinctively Martinican literature, and that his Martinican predecessors were mere imitators, in form and content, of French prose and verse. Couti writes that belying the fallacy of a monolithic French colonial discourse, the writers in question not only divorced themselves from mere imitation, they also introduced distinctive notions of gendered race relations and transatlantic nationalisms that still haunt[]

'Couti's Dangerous Creole Liaisons is a meticulous study, with its strong suit being its careful textual analysis of the works it employs. If not a study that will turn French Caribbean studies on its head, it is certainly a necessary contribution toward advancing the field.' -- Jason Hong, sx salon

This is the first book entirely devoted to an original and thorough examination of literary texts produced by békés (white Creoles) and non-Creole French travellers EL Dangerous Creole Liaisons is an indispensable reference for scholars and students keen on working beyond mainstream Francophone Caribbean literature, and revisiting the underpinnings of Caribbean critical theory and literary aesthetics.' Anny Dominique Curtius, New West Indian Guide