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

This a massive, and massively researched, contribution to studies of the French slave trade: the main text runs to 390 pages, and there are a further 136 pages of notes. It is divided into four parts: a fascinatingly informative account of the history of the slave trade and the various pressures and influences that led to its abolition, followed by analyses of novels on the subject by French women, novels (and a film) by French men, and novels and films by Caribbean and African writers. Miller’s aim is to reveal the connections between the three points of the geographical triangle and so to break down the barrier that separates ‘French’ from ‘francophone’ literature (although in fact most of the French texts he discusses are of interest only from a ‘francophone’ perspective). The preponderance of French texts over Caribbean and African results from the lack of authentic slave narratives in French and from the reluctance of later African writers to engage with the painful question of African complicity in slavery; Miller analyses both these ‘absences’ in some detail. His approach is descriptive rather than polemical; unlike in his previous book, Nationalists and Nomads (1998), there is no overarching theoretical argument, although he sees the topic of the slave trade as in itself inimical to the nomadological thought of Deleuze and Guattari that he has previously attacked, undermining the premium placed on Deleuzean deterritorialization and mobility by the hellish enforced journeys of the Middle Passage. But his explicit goal here is simply ‘to read history, literature and film together’ (p. ix). The main characteristic of the French novels is their ambivalence towards slavery, often both condemned and justified within the same text; Miller’s analysis therefore consists, in each case, of measuring them against an ideal abolitionist position. The ensuing risk of monotony is largely avoided through an emphasis on differences of gender and of genre; while he takes issue with the feminist assumption that late eighteenth-and nineteenth-century women writers were all more abolitionist than their male counterparts, he shows how the feminine genre of sentimental romance enabled authors such as Olympe de Gouges, Madame de Staël and Claire de Duras to inspire in their readers feelings of pity for the enslaved noble savages that they depicted, while the masculine preference for stories of adventure on the high seas subordinated ethical concerns to the excitement of shipwrecks, pirates, etc. – entangled, however, with strong inter-racial homosocial bonding that, in Eugène Sue and Edouard Corbière, almost parallels the inter-racial romances of the female authors. Considered purely as literary criticism, these studies range from the truly illuminating to the somewhat obvious or, simply, thin: he is much better on Césaire than on Glissant, for instance. But their great strength is their embeddedness in detailed historical context, both on the biographical level of the individual writers and the more general level of the political and economic developments that resonated around the three points of the triangle. This book will be an invaluable resource for other scholars.