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  • The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade
  • Jonathan Gosnell
Christopher L. Miller . The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008. xvi + 571 pp. Abbreviations. Ilustrations. Figures. Photographs. Notes. Selected Bibliography. Index. $99.95. Cloth. $27.95. Paper.

Distinguished Professor of African American and French Studies Christopher L. Miller offers a sobering reminder to the scholars jaunting blithely into transatlantic studies: the French slave trade alone forced one million African souls into the Middle Passage, a perilous journey that resulted in a watery death or servitude in the New World. Miller acknowledges the brutality of slavery in his introduction, yet it is the cultural production of the Atlantic slave trade, the serendipitous residue of African enslavement, that serves as the author's focus. And it is a subject worthy indeed of the expansive and ambitious analysis that Miller undertakes. He provides expert navigation, guiding readers among centuries, countries, and media with care and precision, bringing classic French authors and peripheral "Francophone" novelists into conversation along the way. "This book is structured to reflect a broad, 'circum-Atlantic' view," Miller notes, "thus bringing Mérimée into dialogue with Boubacar Boris Diop and Dorothy Dandridge; Madame de Duras with Edouard Glissant; and Voltaire with Césaire" (x). Its intertextual, interdisciplinary approach to understanding diasporic cultures of the slave trade offers a stimulating perspective.

The French Atlantic Triangle tackles complex contemporary as well as historical issues: slavery, of course, but also colonialism, globalization, and culture. These interrelated phenomena constitute a significant world experience, a "Tout-Monde" in the words of the theorist Edouard Glissant. The book is organized into four overlapping parts that follow a chronological progression but include "comparative flashes forward and backward in time" (x). The section titles—"The French Atlantic," "French Women Writers," "French Male Writers," and "The Triangle from Below"—are self-explanatory except for the last, which brings Miller's analysis to the present day, engaging with postcolonial theory, Francophone film, and debates on topics such as reparations. They provide an assortment of interesting, problematic, and sometimes surprising revelations. Miller notes, for example, that slave traders were cultured, "Enlightened" men (62), and he identifies Edouard Corbière as the only known novelist to have actually participated in the slave trade. Should we question the value of Corbière's work as a result, as we question Wagner's scores tainted by anti-Semitism?

In contrast, Miller reassesses the writings of revolutionary Olympe de Gouges, a proponent of women's rights and the emancipation of slaves. He provides a penetrating analysis of Claire de Duras's Ourika, a Senegalese slave woman educated within the French aristocracy at the time of the Revolution and the first African narrator in French literature. Miller examines the pioneering work of Baron Jacques-François Roger, who sought to [End Page 222] efface memories of Haiti (and its violent revolution) and to reassert French endeavors in Africa. In his exploration of Corbière's Le Négrier, Miller adds a title to gay literary studies and effectively queers and colors the pirates of the Caribbean. The "homosociality" between black and white characters in Eugène Sue's Atar-Gull is an influential theme, as indicated by its selection as the cover illustration. Miller probes Mérimée's Tamango, the only text on the slave trade to reach canonic status, for meanings in both literary and cinematographic versions. He contextualizes the "silence" of Francophone literature and film concerning the slave trade. Miller excels at close readings of individual texts (as well as film) and fully fleshes out the larger and often thorny questions and connections. He resurrects certain ideas and works such as Ousmane Sembene's Black Docker, as well as those that have been abandoned almost entirely, like Césaire's notion of "Négritude" in Cahier d'un retour au pays natal.

Christopher Miller has written a cultural history that traces the movement of bodies, ideas, and products in the post-Revolutionary French Atlantic world. The book is a significant contribution to numerous fields, including postcolonial studies, Francophone studies, and gender and cultural studies. The French...

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