Sex, Sea, and Self

Sexuality and Nationalism in French Caribbean Discourses, 1924-1948

Jacqueline Couti

Liverpool University Press

Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures LUP

Exciting new perspective on how the migration of people and ideas has created a discursive crosspollination of national imaginaries of metropolitan France and the French Caribbean that dialogue with and feed off of each other
Uses non-canonical sources in French Caribbean literature to interrogate gendered and racialized epistemologies of knowledge through literary archeology and an anthropology of literature
Fosters a novel understanding of the interconnected matrices of nation, gender, sexuality, race, and class in Caribbean literature
Makes cutting-edge theoretical studies of Caribbean literature available to a broad scholarly audience
Looks beyond the Negritude movement to explore how notions of Blackness in the French Caribbean remain entangled with French Creole and French continental principles of whiteness

Sex, Sea, and Self

Sexuality and Nationalism in French Caribbean Discourses, 1924-1948

Jacqueline Couti

Liverpool University Press

Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures LUP

Description

Sex, Sea, and Self reassesses the place of the French Antilles and French Caribbean literature within current postcolonial thought and visions of the Black Atlantic. Using a feminist lens, this study examines neglected twentieth-century French texts by Black writers from Martinique and Guadeloupe, making the analysis of some of these texts available to readers of English for the first time. This interdisciplinary study of female and male authors reconsiders their political strategies and the critical role of French creoles in the creation of their own history. This approach recalibrates overly simplistic understandings of the victimization and alienation of French Caribbean people. In the systems of cultural production under consideration, sexuality constitutes an instrument of political and cultural consciousness in the chaotic period between 1924 and 1948. Studying sexual imagery constructed around female bodies demonstrates the significance of agency and the legacy of the past in cultural resistance and political awareness. Sex, Sea, and Self particularly highlights Antillean women intellectuals' theoretical contributions to Caribbean critical theory. Therefore, this analysis illuminates debates on the multifaceted and conflicted relationships between France and its overseas departments and expands ideas of nationhood in the Black Atlantic and the Americas.