Engendering Islands

Sexuality, Reproduction, and Violence in the Early French Caribbean

Ashley M. Williard

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781496220240
• eBook ISBN: 9781496225450
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: French History
• Index: History

In seventeenth-century Antillesthe violence of dispossession and enslavement was mapped onto men's and women's bodies, bolstered by resignified tropes of gender, repurposed concepts of disability, and emerging racial discourses. As colonials and ecclesiastics developed local practices and institutions—particularly family formation and military force—they consolidated old notions into new categories that affected all social groups. In Engendering Islands Ashley M. Williard argues that early Caribbean reconstructions of masculinity and femininity sustained occupation, slavery, and nascent ideas of race. In the face of historical silences, Williard's close readings of archival and narrative texts revealsthe words, images, and perspectives that reflected and produced new ideas of human difference. Juridical, religious, and medical discourses expose the interdependence of multiple conditions—male and female, enslaved and free, Black and white, Indigenous and displaced, normative and disabled—in the islands claimed for the French Crown. In recent yearsscholars have interrogated key aspects of Atlantic slavery, but none have systematically approached the archive of gender, particularly as it intersects with race and disability, in the seventeenth-century French Caribbean. The constructions of masculinity and femininity embedded in this early colonial context help elucidate attendant notions of otherness and the systems of oppression they sustained. Williard shows the ways gender contributed to and complicated emerging notions of racial difference that justified slavery and colonial domination, thus setting the stage for centuries of French imperialism.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Evangelism between the Cultural and the Corporeal
• 2. Colonial Marriage and the Production of Cloistered White Femininity
• 3. Cannibals, Pirates, and the Authorization of Colonial Violence
• 4. Dishonoring and Debilitating Black Masculinity
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About Ashley M. Williard
• Series List