The French Atlantic: Travels in Culture and History (review)

This book is in some sense a continuation of the project that Bill Marshall inaugurated in 2005 with his edition of the encyclopedia France and the Americas: Culture, Politics and History (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO). It also shares similarities with Christopher L. Miller's The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008; see FS, 63 (2009), 121-22); but it covers a far wider area, both geographically and thematically: while the slave trade is a recurrent theme in Marshall's book, it is by no means the only one. Given Marshall's previous work in French Canadian culture, the latter's prominence here comes as no surprise. But what is both new and very stimulating in relation to previous work in cultural history is the use of place as the organizing category. The book's seven main chapters are devoted to Nantes, La Rochelle, Saint-Pierre et Miquelon, Quebec City, New Orleans, Cayenne, and Montevideo; each one combines a historical account concentrating on patterns of French migration and settlement in the city (or islands) in question, with a discussion of its representations in literature and film. There is a conscious concern to ground the cultural analysis in its material determinants, and also to focus on less canonical places: Guyane rather than Martinique or Guadeloupe, Quebec City rather than Montreal, Nantes and La Rochelle rather than Bordeaux. The book's central aim is to replace the centre-periphery model of Frenchness, in which the metropole is endowed with the prestige of source and origin, with a mobile diasporic topography and a sensitivity to the interaction of centripetal and centrifugal forces. The introduction develops this theoretical framework in relation to three precursors: Paul Gilroy's conception of the Black Atlantic, Édouard Glissant's creolization and Relation, and, above all, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's Mille plateaux. Deleuzean notions of deterritorialization, the 'minor', and the 'molecular' inform the whole book: Marshall is careful not to draw general conclusions, but produces series of fairly brief, often witty, descriptions of particular, discrete texts and historical incidents. This 'molecular' attention to 'the line of flight of particles' (p. 18) demands a certain mental agility on the part of the reader, who occasionally — in this reader's case, anyway — feels that too many molecules have been crammed into one sentence. It also means that the book is rather curiously positioned in relation to the notion of argument: its whole structure, the selection and organization of its material, and its theoretical introduction constitute an argument against a more conventional conception of Frenchness and its diffusion; but within each individual chapter, the book is entirely descriptive. Thus it is the level of sheer interest aroused by Marshall's descriptions — particularly of previously underdocumented areas such as the very significant French immigration to Uruguay, the role of Saint-Pierre et Miquelon during prohibition in the USA, or the interaction between slaves and French convicts in Cayenne — that fully vindicates the book's commitment to opening up a new perspective both on the French Atlantic and on cultural history more generally.