The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade (review)

The blurbs on the back of Christopher Miller's French Atlantic Triangle accurately describe it as dazzling, provocative, authoritative, and meticulously researched. There are few aspects of the topic of slavery in the Francophone world that Miller fails to cover, and thus this important volume provides an essential compendium of information for students and scholars of French literature and history. The succession of major writers discussed chronologically in the 14 chapters of the book includes Voltaire, Staël, Gouges, Duras, Mérimée, Césaire, Glissant, and Condé, plus some less often discussed authors such as Eugène Sue, Edouard Corbière, and Baron Roger. All three points on the Atlantic Triangle — France, Africa, and the Caribbean — receive detailed attention. So too do both the colonial and post-colonial periods. Indeed, The French Atlantic Triangle is so packed with information and analysis (including 135 pages of notes; 166 footnotes devoted to the 39 pages of the introduction alone) that readers will probably have to decide how and in what detail they wish to use this book. I confess that reading it from cover to cover was daunting. It would be regrettable if its weighty scholarship, one of its many notable strengths, detracted from its goal of bringing widespread recognition to the fact that the slave trade needs to be acknowledged as "one of the prime figures in the collective memory of the modern world" (49).

Chapter three can serve to illustrate the depth and breadth of Miller's approach. This chapter focuses on Voltaire's play Alzire (1736) performed, in among other places, aboard a ship in 1766. Set in Peru and "directly concerned with conquest, colonialism, and slavery" (71), Alzire was viewed by the slave trader Joseph Mosneron who, like others of his class, read works by Rousseau and others Enlightenment figures. What interests Miller is the curious fact that Mosneron viewed Alzire in Gorée, where it was not only performed by slave-trading sailors but in close proximity to the very place where enslaved Africans were held in captivity. Miller explores the ways in which those who were exposed to the horrors of slavery managed in producing, viewing, or performing the play to sidestep and displace the issue of the slave trade and ultimately absorb "only what was useful and supportive" of their worldview (70). Noting that plays such as Alzire were also performed in Saint-Domingue by persons of color, Miller weaves a rich tapestry of the perspectives of French writers, slave traders, sailors, slaves, and actors of color. His reading and textual analyses of memoirs such as those by Mosneron which scholars have made available in recent decades are probing. His searches in ARTFL to show the historical meaning of key words such as "esclave," "traite," or "retour" are a model of scholarly linguistic research. Such riches are, of course, present in all the chapters.

Three specific aspects of this book — the issues of sexuality, race, and gender — perhaps explain the adjective "provocative" mentioned above. Chapters 11 and 12, which delve into the arenas of shipping, piracy, and slavery, are eye-opening regarding how integral homosociality and homosexuality were to the sea-faring world of which the slave trade was an integral part. In discussing Sue and the maritime novel of the 1830s, Miller provides an illuminating queer theory analysis of the literature of slavery. That he is willing to raise issues such as the rape of male captives by slave traders and to point out that liberation from slavery and liberation from heteronormativity do not go hand in hand (320–21) are welcome instances of forthrightness often lacking in nineteenth-century French literary criticism.

Regarding race, Miller works hard to acknowledge "resistance from within, below, and outside"(4). Acknowledging the inevitable imbalance between French abolitionists and the slaves who were silenced at the time, Miller uses twentieth-century novels and films to include black perspectives on slavery. As...