Libertine Colony

Garraway Doris L Garraway

Description

Presenting incisive original readings of French writing about the Caribbean from the inception of colonization in the 1640s until the onset of the Haitian Revolution in the 1790s, Doris Garraway sheds new light on a significant chapter in French colonial history. At the same time, she makes a pathbreaking contribution to the study of the cultural contact, creolization, and social transformation that resulted in one of the most profitable yet brutal slave societies in history. Garraway's readings highlight how French colonial writers characterized the Caribbean as a space of spiritual, social, and moral depravity. While tracing this critique in colonial accounts of Island Carib cultures, piracy, spirit beliefs, slavery, miscegenation, and incest, Garraway develops a theory of "the libertine colony." She argues that desire and sexuality were fundamental to practices of domination, laws of exclusion, and constructions of race in the slave societies of the colonial French Caribbean.Among the texts Garraway analyzes are missionary histories by Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre, Raymond Breton, and Jean-Baptiste Labat; narratives of adventure and transgression written by pirates and others outside the official civil and religious power structures; travel accounts; treatises on slavery and colonial administration in Saint-Domingue; the first colonial novel written in French; and the earliest linguistic description of the native Carib language. Garraway also analyzes legislation-including the Code noir-that codified slavery and other racialized power relations. The Libertine Colony is both a rich cultural history of creolization as revealed in Francophone colonial literature and an important contribution to theoretical arguments about how literary critics and historians should approach colonial discourse and cultural representations of slave societies.

Sujets

• Histoire
• Biological anthropology
• History of the Americas

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 08 juillet 2005
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822386513
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

he ibertine Colony

     

he LIBERTINE COLONY

Creolization in the Early French Caribbean

oris arraway

     

Durham and London

©  D uke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper  Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan Typeset in Adobe Caslon by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging- in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

In loving memory of Michael O. Garraway and Paolo Palezzato

Contents

Illustrations

Preface

xi

ix

Introduction Creolization in the Old Regime

Chapter One Border of Violence, Border of Desire: The French and the Island Caribs

Chapter Two Domestication and the White Noble Savage

Chapter Three Creolization and the Spirit World: Demons, Violence, and the Body

Chapter Four The Libertine Colony: Desire, Miscegenation, and the Law

Chapter Five Race, Reproduction, and Family Romance in Saint-Domingue

Conclusion

Notes



Works Cited

Index

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

Illustrations

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. . . . . . .

‘‘Christophe Colomb descend à terre, & prend possession de l’Isle Guanahani’’  ‘‘L’Isle de la Martinique’’  Frontispiece, Du Tertre,Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les François Frontispiece, Rochefort,Histoire naturelle et morale des iles Antilles de l’Amérique ‘‘Visite des sauvages aux François’’  Carib man and woman  Pages from Breton,Dictionaire caraïbe-françois ‘‘Carte des Isles de l’Amérique’’  Tortoise hunting  Frontispiece, Oexmelin,Histoire des avanturiers Portrait of ‘‘Rock Brasiliano’’  Chateau of General Phillipe de Lonvilliers de Poincy, governor of Saint Christopher  Frontispiece, Labat,Nouveau voyage aux isles de l’Amérique Engraving of invertebrates  ‘‘Sucrerie’’  ‘‘Comble de moulin’’  ‘‘Ménagerie’’  ‘‘La figure des Moulins a Sucre’’  Allegory of Nature, represented by a white woman nursing a white child and a black child 