Dangerous creole liaisons : sexuality and nationalism in French Caribbean discourses from 1806 to 1897 / Jacqueline Couti.

Author
Couti, Jacqueline [Browse]
Format
Book
Language
English
Published/​Created
  • Liverpool : Liverpool University Press, 2016.
  • ©2016
Description
1 online resource (x, 276 pages.)

Details

Subject(s)
Biographical/​Historical note
Jacqueline Couti is Associate Professor, French Studies at Rice University, Houston, Texas.
Summary note
Dangerous Creole Liaisons explores a French Caribbean context to broaden discussions of sexuality, nation building, and colonialism in the Americas. Couti examines how white Creoles perceived their contributions to French nationalism through the course of the nineteenth century as they portrayed sexualized female bodies and sexual and racial difference to advance their political ideologies. Questioning their exhilarating exoticism and titillating eroticism underscores the ambiguous celebration of the Creole woman as both seductress and an object of lust. She embodies the Caribbean as a space of desire and a political site of contest that reflects colonial, slave and post-slave societies. The under-researched white Creole writers and non-Caribbean authors (such as Lafcadio Hearn) who traveled to and wrote about these islands offer an intriguing gendering and sexualization of colonial and nationalist discourses. Their use of the floating motif of the female body as the nation exposes a cultural cross-pollination, an intense dialogue of political identity between continental France and her Caribbean colonies. Couti suggests that this cross-pollination still persists. Eventually, representations of Creole women's bodies (white and black) bring two competing conceptions of nationalism into play: a local, bounded, French nationalism against a transatlantic and more fluid nationalism that included the Antilles in a 'greater France.'-- Provided by publisher.
Bibliographic references
Includes bibliographical references (pages 255-270) and index.
Reproduction note
Electronic reproduction. New York Available via World Wide Web.
Source of description
Description based on print version record.
ISBN
  • 9781781384046 (electronic bk.)
  • 1781384045 (electronic bk.)
Statement on language in description
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