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  • The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade
  • Thomas A. Hale (bio)
The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade. By Christopher L. Miller. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. xvi + 592 pp. $27.95.

Scholars and social commentators have written many books and articles on aspects of the slave trade. But The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade is the first analysis to integrate history and culture, [End Page 433] Europe, Africa, and the New World, and past and present in an extraordinary synthesis. The book is a monumental study of a period that France is only beginning to recognize as part of its past. To undertake a project of this scope, Miller draws on an extremely diverse and detailed range of documentation listed in 130 pages of endnotes.

He divides the book into four parts, each of which contains from three to five chapters. A listing of the chapters gives a clearer sense of the scope of the book as well as a view of some of the terms which he uses in new ways—for example, "translation" not in the narrow sense of rendering a text into another language, but instead as a re-presentation of the subject of slavery for a society that does not want to face up to the horrors of the trade in Africans.

In Part One, "The French Atlantic," he analyzes the slave trade itself, both the brutality that marked its history as well as the diverse attitudes toward it by the great figures of the French Enlightenment, including Voltaire, one of its beneficiaries. He concludes that studies of francophone African literature fail to take into account or even grasp the significance of the slave trade. Visionary Caribbean writers such as Césaire are one of the most striking outcomes of this commerce. Chapters included in this part, in addition to the introduction, are "Around the Triangle," "The Slave Trade and the Enlightenment," and the "Veeritions [or sweeping and scanning (96)] of History," an allusion to one of the most obscure terms in Césaire's most famous work, Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, which appeared in an initial version in issue 20 of the French journal Volontés in 1939 (23–51).

In Part Two, Miller examines the anti-slavery efforts of French women writers such as Olympe de Gouges, Madame de Staël, and Claire Duras. With their diverse works, they "translated" the slave trade for an audience that was only beginning to become aware of the consequences of the commerce in humans. Chapters include "Revolution, Abolitionist Translation, Sentiment," "Gendering Abolitionism," "Olympe de Gouges, Earwitness to the Ills of America," "Madame de Staël, Mirza and Pauline: Atlantic Memories," and "Duras and Her Ourika, 'The Ultimate House Slave.'"

With Part Three, "Restoration, Abolition, Entertainment," Miller shifts the focus to male writers, the most remarkable of whom was Prosper Mérimée, author of Tamango that appeared in a collection titled Mosaïque about a French slave trader whose ship was taken over by its rebellious human cargo. In one form or another, the play made a tour of the triangle and was reinterpreted more than a century later in 1958 as an adventure film by American expatriates in France. [End Page 434]

The most striking discovery in this part, however, is the homoeroticism and homosociality that mark the male-dominated world of seamen in general and in particular the characters in two novels that deal with the slave trade, Atar-Gull (1841) by Eugène Sue and Le négrier (1832) by Edouard Corbière. The chapter titles include "Tamango around the Atlantic: Concatenations of Revolt," "Forget Haiti: Baron Roger and the New Africa," "Homosexuality, Reckoning and Recognition in Eugène Sue's Atar-Gull ," and "Edouard Corbière, 'Mating' and Maritime Adventure."

Part Four offers the reader contemporary views of the triangle trade as portrayed in literature by the descendants of slaves. He starts with Césaire, Glissant, and Condé under the title "Reimagining the Atlantic" and moves on to "The African Silence."

Early on in the book, Miller refers to Cahier d'un retour...

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