Dangerous Creole Liaisons : Sexuality and Nationalism in French Caribbean Discourses from 1806 to 1897

image/jpeg thumbnail

Fiche validée

Titre Dangerous Creole Liaisons : Sexuality and Nationalism in French Caribbean Discourses from 1806 to 1897
Type de publication Livre
Langue principale de la publication anglais
Année de publication 2016
Auteur Jacqueline COUTI
Nombre de pages 224
ISBN (Forme EAN-13) 9781781383018
Résumé/Présentation "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'? " (site de l'éditeur, 07.2016)
Référence complète Couti, Jacqueline. Dangerous Creole Liaisons : Sexuality and Nationalism in French Caribbean Discourses from 1806 to 1897. Liverpool : Liverpool University Press, 2016, 224 p. - ISBN: 9781781383018 .

Auteurs

Jacqueline COUTI

Biographie : Jacqueline Couti is Associate Professor, French and Francophone Studies at the University of Kentucky (Liv. UP, 2016)