The French Atlantic Triangle

Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade

Christopher L. Miller

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780822341512, 9780822341277
• eBook ISBN: 9780822388838
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

The French slave trade forced more than one million Africans across the Atlantic to the islands of the Caribbean. It enabled France to establish Saint-Domingue, the single richest colony on earth, and it connected France, Africa, and the Caribbean permanently. Yet the impact of the slave trade on the cultures of France and its colonies has received surprisingly little attention. Until recently, France had not publicly acknowledged its history as a major slave-trading power. The distinguished scholar Christopher L. Miller proposes a thorough assessment of the French slave trade and its cultural ramifications, in a broad, circum-Atlantic inquiry. This magisterial work is the first comprehensive examination of the French Atlantic slave trade and its consequences as represented in the history, literature, and film of France and its former colonies in Africa and the Caribbean.

Miller offers a historical introduction to the cultural and economic dynamics of the French slave trade, and he shows how Enlightenment thinkers such as Montesquieu and Voltaire mused about the enslavement of Africans, while Rousseau ignored it. He follows the twists and turns of attitude regarding the slave trade through the works of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century French writers, including Olympe de Gouges, Madame de Staël, Madame de Duras, Prosper Mérimée, and Eugène Sue. For these authors, the slave trade was variously an object of sentiment, a moral conundrum, or an entertaining high-seas "adventure." Turning to twentieth-century literature and film, Miller describes how artists from Africa and the Caribbean—including the writers Aimé Césaire, Maryse Condé, and Edouard Glissant, and the filmmakers Ousmane Sembene, Guy Deslauriers, and Roger Gnoan M'Bala—have confronted the aftermath of France's slave trade, attempting to bridge the gaps between silence and disclosure, forgetfulness and memory.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Part One - The French Atlantic
• ONE - Introduction
• TWO - Around the Triangle
• THREE - The Slave Trade in the Enlightenment
• FOUR - The Veeritions of History
• Part Two - French Women Writers: Revolution, Abolitionist Translation, Sentiment (1783–1823)
• FIVE - Gendering Abolitionism
• SIX - Olympe de Gouges, “Earwitness to the Ills of America”
• SEVEN - Madame de Staël, Mirza, and Pauline: Atlantic Memories
• EIGHT - Duras and Her Ourika, “The Ultimate House Slave”
• Conclusion to Part Two
• Part Three - French Male Writers: Restoration, Abolition, Entertainment
• NINE - Tamango around the Atlantic: Concatenations of Revolt
• TEN - Forget Haiti: Baron Roger and the New Africa
• ELEVEN - Homosociality, Reckoning, and Recognition in Eugène Sue’s Atar-Gull
• TWELVE - Edouard Corbière, “Mating,” and Maritime Adventure
• Part Four - The Triangle from “Below”
• THIRTEEN - Césaire, Glissant, Condé: Reimagining the Atlantic
• FOURTEEN - African “Silence”
• Conclusion: Reckoning, Reparation, and the Value of Fictions
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index