The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean (review)

When literary scholars venture into territory that has largely been the province of historians, they tend to adopt a posture of defensiveness. Refreshingly, this is not so in the case of Doris Garraway's The Libertine Colony. Broadening the scope of the literary, Garraway studies representations of the colonial Caribbean from the 1640s to the 1790s in French missionary relations, ethnographies, travel accounts, novels, dictionaries, and adventure narratives. While interdisciplinarity and generic diversity constitute some of the strong suits of the book, its scholarly contribution is more far-reaching. An invigorating and imaginative analysis of creolization in the Ancien Régime French Caribbean, The Libertine Colony traces the centrality of the "roles of desire and sexuality in mediating colonial power relations" (24).

Elaborated fully in the last two chapters and arguably most compelling sections of the book, Garraway's central thesis of the "libertine colony" maintains that illicit interracial structures of desire were fundamental to practices of exclusion and domination in the colonial French Caribbean. Delving into works by Hilliard d'Auberteuil, Baron Wimpffen, and Moreau de Saint-Méry, among others, these two chapters investigate the ties between Saint-Domingue's racially segregated caste system on the one hand, and the persistent networks of desire and sexuality between white men and women of color on the other. Garraway demonstrates the ways in which French discourses on Saint-Domingue repress and displace miscegenation rather than prohibit it, thereby enabling exploitative sexual relationships. Moreover, by projecting the stigma of miscegenation onto the "concupiscent mulatto woman" (233) and other mixed-race subjects, colonial texts legitimate white male desire and sexual power. Like cultural historian Françoise Vergès, who has analyzed French colonialism in the Indian Ocean through the metaphor of the family romance, Garraway offers a persuasive psychoanalytical perspective of sexual politics in the colonial Caribbean. For instance, she locates the fantasy of an incestuous family romance in writings about Saint-Domingue, that is, "evidence of white male desire for both black and mulatto women, whom they imagine as their symbolic daughters" (277).

The first three chapters of The Libertine Colony address not so much interracial sexual contact in the Caribbean, but other libidinal economies of colonial desire. Here the discourses of libertinage refer to anxieties in colonial texts about the threatening and uncontrollable nature of the creolizing process. Garraway deftly mines the writings of French missionaries such as Du Tertre, Breton, and Labat, pirate writers like Oexmelin, and Blessebois' novel Le Zombi du Grand-Pérou. These early chapters explore the tensions between violence and desire in French encounters with Island Caribs, early colonists' libertine resistance to the colonial social order, and the erotic subtext in narratives of the spirit world.

By all accounts, The Libertine Colony is Garraway's first book-length publication. Yet it has none of the rough edges of a first monograph, reading like the work of a seasoned scholar. Garraway's research is comprehensive, her readings astute, and her approach innovative. The Libertine Colony makes an important critical intervention in the fields of Caribbean studies, postcolonial studies, European colonial history, and French and francophone literary criticism.