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

This is a book of encyclopedic reach and vast dimensions. It begins with Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws in 1748 and follows the path of French debates about the slave trade through the revolutionary period and the abolitionism of the 1830s and 1840s to twentieth-century representations of the slave trade. While most expansive in the discussion of narrative fiction, Miller also devotes substantial space to historical non-fiction, philosophical texts, poetry, theater, and film. The geographical reach is no less daunting and includes metropolitan France, the French-speaking Caribbean, and French-speaking Africa.

Although there has been a steady trickle of studies of the cultures of the slave-trading Atlantic in recent years from scholars who focus on the Caribbean and the English-speaking Atlantic, this has not happened for France. As Miller states in his Introduction, “To read the broader littérature négrière now . . . is, to a large extent, to marvel at the ability of France to keep the problem of slavery out of sight and out of mind.” (x) Miller’s main aim is to document those texts that do venture to speak about slavery and the trade and to reconstruct their contribution to the abolitionist cause as well as their significant ambivalences and equivocations.

The book is divided into four parts. Part One is largely historical and philosophical and introduces the themes and arguments that constitute what Miller calls the “French Atlantic triangle,” a name that in itself entails a revisionist perspective, an alternative to the conventional (and conventionally euro-centric) concept of “francophonie.” Part Two is devoted to “French Women Writers,” Part Three to “French Male Writers,” and Part Four to “The Triangle from ‘Below.’” The conclusion turns to the French “memory wars” of recent years. The book is complemented by substantial and useful notes and a bibliography that covers literary materials and some selected historiography.

The French Atlantic Triangle is meticulously researched, almost comprehensive in its treatment of the literary corpus, and makes diligent use of historical scholarship. It offers an astonishing web of circuits of reception, rereadings and intertextual relations between key texts (e.g. Merimée’s “Tamango,” Claire de Duras’ Ourika, but also an ingenious staging of a slaver’s reading of Rousseau) and thus fills a troubling gap in French literary and cultural history. There are some outstanding chapters devoted to Césaire, Glissant, and the Creolité movement, which go a long way to complicate and correct the theoreticist reductivism that has dominated much recent critical literature. The inclusion of the problematic of slavery in Africa--a topic that has remained largely the domain of historians until now—is a bold move. The book will no doubt become an indispensable resource for a new generation of scholars.

Miller makes no secret of the humanistic inspiration of his study and its key concern with “justice” which he seems to understand, quoting Maryse Condé, as a “simple and accurate recognition” of France’s slave past (388). In his conclusion he makes it clear that this is not just “theory” for him: “. . . I wish someone could ‘commission’ first-rate French novels and films related to the slave trade: such works might do more for the promotion of memory than all the rest combined. . . . With dozens of clever French novelists . . . rewriting literary classics from a different point of view, . . . why can’t they turn their talents to the untold stories of the slave trade?” (389). Well, why can’t they? The French Atlantic Triangle goes a long way to reconstructing the literary archive that such memory work could draw on, but it does not answer the more provocative and troubling question of why this has not happened and what that might mean for our political culture.

The equivocations regarding the term slavery in the writings of Rousseau and others, which Miller amply documents, are very troubling indeed. But Miller’s critique seems to be limited to deploring that Rousseau did not pay more attention to...