Slavery in the Caribbean Francophone World: Distant Voices, Forgotten Acts, Forged Identities (review)

This volume results from a conference on slavery in the Francophone Caribbean World, held at the University of Georgia in 1997. This is a tantalizing, if uneven, collection of essays on slavery in the French Atlantic embodying a wide range of literary, linguistic and historical approaches. The material as a whole shows how very rich the subject area is and how much room there is for additional research.

The historical events that underlie all of the essays in the volume are ably and succinctly retold by the editor, Doris Kadish in her introduction. Her concise historical overview of slavery in the French West Indies narrattes the complex unfolding of the slave revolts and the revolution in the French Caribbean. With the 200th anniversary of Haiti's declaration of independence approaching in 2004, this summary will be very useful for those who wish a quick, reliable summary of the chief social-political events.

The volume's essays are organized into four main sections: 1) "French Perspectives"—eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Francophone writings about slavery, 2) "American Perspectives"—reverberations of the revolutionary actions of Francophone people of color in the United States, 3) "Caribbean Perspectives"—traces of slavery in the language and literature of the French Caribbean, and 4) "Legacies"—a pair of essays on continuities between plantation slavery and the modern penal system and a sensitive conversation with Caribbean writer Maryse Condé on the complications of the heritage of slavery to black, brown, and white citizens of modern French Guadeloupe and Martinique.

The range of analytical approaches poses the first challenge to readers. Historians and literary scholars approach texts—novels, newspapers, notarial records, and so on—for different purposes and in different ways. The historian's task is to tell what happened and analyze why it occurred. Literary critics emphasize how the tale is told and to what ends. Sometimes these interests overlap as some historians and literary scholars are similarly interested in the ways that stories—both deliberately fictive and those laying claim to truth-telling—reflect struggles for power in the societies that produced the texts.

Some historian readers will no doubt be exasperated by literary approaches that borrow theoretical stances and apply them to historical documents to, for example, "retrace kaleidoscopic visions of liberty around 1789" (p. 20). So, too, will those with more sophisticated theoretical training be frustrated by the more flat-footed approaches adopted by some of the historical writers of the collection.

As one who is trained in cultural history, I am drawn most strongly to essays such as that by the late Kimberly S. Hanger. Her exploration of the complex attitudes and actions of free people of African descent in Louisiana during the transition from French to Spanish legal codes provides a succinct and fascinating encounter with an all-too-overlooked set of historical agents. Her compelling use of notarial records allows us to see how former slaves were implicated in and made use of the contradictory forces at work in this tumultuous period, when social status was being renegotiated at numerous interstices.

However, discipline does not trump careful scholarship and analysis. As a newcomer to Francophone Caribbean fiction and drama, I found the essays by A. James Arnold and Doris Kadish on contemporary Francophone Caribbean fiction both accessible and stimulating. Arnold contrasts the masculinist stock characters and plotting of the fictions of such writers as Edouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant with the more woman-centered writings of Dany Bébel-Gisler and Maryse Condé. Doris Kadish's thoughtful and nuanced introduction to the work and thought of Guadeloupean novelist and playwright Maryse Condé opens a window into one artist's engaged struggle to "draw upon the past to forge identities as free and independent citizens for the future" (p. 212).

By contrast, Joan Dayan'...