Fictions coloniales du XVIIIe siècle: 'Ziméo' — 'Lettres africaines' — 'Adonis; ou, le bon nègre, anecdote coloniale' (review)

Recent years have seen a welcome revival of interest in the representation of Blacks in French literature, and scholars other than closet racists recognize increasingly not only that texts often considered marginal in fact illustrate central preoccupations and illuminate them in significant ways but also that they are highly relevant to French society today, still agonizing over the fallout from its colonial past. Dr Charara's book is less a study, as the title might suggest, than a valuable edition of the three texts indicated in the subtitle, particularly informative on their literary sources and affiliations. A sixteen-page general introduction is followed by Saint-Lambert's 1769 short story, Butini's 1771 epistolary novella and Picquenard's 1798 novel, preceded in each case by a more substantial introduction and followed by detailed notes. The volume concludes with useful appendices 'qui entrent en ré sonance avec les fictions coloniales' — reviews of Zimeéo and Lettres africaines from Éphémérides du citoyen and extracts from nine relevant eighteenth-century texts on Africa and the West Indies— and a bibliography (but, infuriatingly, no index). Aphra Behn's Oroonoko is seen as seminal, through La Place's 1745 translation (which changed the original ending from tragedy to marital bliss), in influencing the ideal of happiness resonant in the three texts. Charara sees physiocratic thinking and Charles Leslie's 1739 history of Jamaica (translated 1751) as important sources for Ziméo (and for Butini) and generally concentrates on influences and features not highlighted in my 1997 edition (see FS, LIV (2000), 88-89) but, curiously, does not engage with it directly. Lettres africaines, of which this is the first modern edition, are shown as indebted to Ziméo, La Nouvelle Héloïse, Zaïde and Oroonoko (one might add Don Quijote) but as the first text in French to link 'la dé cadence é conomique et le ré gime de l'esclavage' (p. 166), so anticipating Condorcet. '[L]'espace public du roman politique et l'espace privé du roman sentimental sont superposables à bien des é gards' (p. 98). Adonis, set in revolutionary Saint-Domingue, is described variously as 'politico-moral', 'dé mocratique', 'pé dagogique', 'philosophique', 'historique' and 'd'amour', with elements of the 'roman utopique' and the 'roman populaire'. This would seem to give the full measure of its interest and complexity, but Chris Bongie's archival research for his edition of Adonis and Zoflora (L'Harmattan, 2006) extends and enriches Charara's reading, invalidating some of her historical assumptions. Picquenard turns out notably to have been a member of the Commission led by Sonthonax and Polverel and to have stayed on the island until August 1793, not November 1791: unlike so many authors of 'colonial fiction' in the eighteenth century, he was no armchair abolitionist. Charara is right to assert that 'le ré fé rent colonial impose le recours à des sources documentaires' (p. 8) but is here hoist on her own petard. She is equally right, however, that the novelist distances himself through thematic or axiological choices which explore the 'margins' of history, and this legitimizes her foregrounding of the cross-referential literary network which is the great strength of this edition.