Troubling Amnesia: The Slave Trade in French and Francophone Literature and Culture

This is an ambitious and urgent work, given current debates on the memory of slavery within France and beyond. Miller focuses particularly on the slave trade, rather than on slavery more generally, although he acknowledges the extent to which these cannot be satisfactorily separated out. In the French Atlantic triangle of his title, he includes France, parts of Africa, the French islands of the Caribbean, and Louisiana. The triangle acts as a dominant figure and as a "figure of dominance," suggesting a "logic of ineluctable, 'eternal' relationships: father, mother, offspring—terms that in the cultural logic of colonialism translate into Europe, Africa, and the New World" (5). Two key figures of desire, literature and money, animated and reflected this new world order, and Miller persuasively links these throughout to issues of ambivalence and affirmation. He shows how France, throughout colonial and postcolonial history, will be torn between its benevolent, liberal impulses, religious at first, then humanitarian, and its desire to conquer and profit.

The monograph is organized into fourteen chapters, forming four main sections, and spanning 400 years. Miller's breadth and depth of reading allows him to locate the French slave trade within an exceptionally broad historical context, integrating detailed biographical information, while also providing astute and sensitive close readings. Miller discusses a wide range of well-known writers, from Voltaire to Condé, and from Mérimée to Sembène, and there is welcome and detailed examination of some lesser-known authors, such as Baron Roger and Victor Séjour. At 571 pages, over 130 of which are notes, the monograph is as meticulous in its approach as it is daring in its conclusions.

Early in the study, Miller traces the etymology of the French word for the slave trade, la traite, reminding readers that it is linked not to terms such as traiter, "to treat or to deal with," or traité, "treaty," but rather to the verb traire, "to milk." In contrast with its English equivalent trade, then, the word's etymology sets up a relationship based on extraction, premised on the passivity of one party and the activity of the other, rather than on any notion of interaction or reciprocity. And yet, as Miller notes, "etymology is not history [and] la traite des esclaves did in fact work as a trade, as an economy of exchange according to 'rational' sets of prices, and not as a pure extraction or theft of Africans from Africa by Europeans" (12). Such attentiveness to language, combined with systematic reading against the grain so as to avoid hasty conclusions, is one of the hallmarks of a study that brilliantly integrates nuanced textual explication within broad and authoritative historical scene-setting. Other commonplace terms used to describe the trade, in both English and French—Middle Passage, culture, the related terms cattle, chattel, and capital, traduire, retour, matelot—are sounded out for what they reveal and conceal about the conceptualization and practices of the trade.

The first substantial section of the monograph, comprising the introduction and three subsequent sections, "Around the Triangle," "The Slave Trade and the Enlightenment," and, with a nod to Aimé Césaire, "The Veeritions of History," scrutinizes France's rise to preeminence as one of the great Atlantic slaving nations of the eighteenth century. As Miller notes, of the 1.1 million Africans exported by the French, over one million were traded in the eighteenth century alone. This section, packed with authoritative and fascinating insights, should be required reading for anyone interested in the Enlightenment, in the history of ideas, in the economic and cultural history of colonialism generally, and in the history and literature of the slave trade in particular. Miller's breadth of reading allows him to call into question dominant versions of history. For example, it is widely accepted that the slave trade originated in a 1642 decree by Louis XIII, which authorized the trade in order to save the souls of Africans...