“This dazzling, provocative book is a compendium that sets an
explosive new agenda for French Studies. Christopher L. Miller's work is
important not only for scholars but also for postcolonial France as it struggles
to comes to grips with its past.”—Paul Gilroy, author of The Black Atlantic:
Modernity and Double Consciousness
“This is a lovely book about an un-lovely subject. Christopher L.
Miller brings the insight of a mature major scholar to questions about
literature, slavery, and culture in the Francophone world.”—Kwame Anthony
Appiah, author of Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers
“Revealing a remarkable breadth of knowledge, Christopher
L. Miller combines conceptual sophistication, an authoritative analysis of
Francophone texts, and a compelling discussion of the ways that the French
Atlantic triangle emerged and put a lasting imprint on French imagination and
politics. This is a significant contribution to an understanding of the world
slavery built. It is a truly great book; it should be read by anyone who cares
about race, memory, literature, and citizenship.”—Françoise Vergès, author of
Monsters and Revolutionaries: Colonial Family Romance and
Métissage
“The French Atlantic Triangle is a tremendous achievement.
Meticulously researched and lucidly written, it is an introduction to a
neglected water world, without knowledge of which our encounter with continental
history and literature is doomed to
perpetuate biases and omissions.”—Deborah
Jenson, author of Trauma and Its Representations: The Social Life of Mimesis
in Post-Revolutionary France
This magisterial work is the first comprehensive
examination of the French Atlantic slave trade and its consequences as
represented in the history, literature, and film of France and its former
colonies in Africa and the Caribbean. Miller offers a historical introduction to
the cultural and economic dynamics of the French slave trade, and he shows how
Enlightenment thinkers such as Montesquieu and Voltaire mused about the
enslavement of Africans, while Rousseau ignored
it. He follows the twists and
turns of attitude regarding the slave trade through the works of
lateeighteenth-and early-nineteenth-century French writers, including Olympe de
Gouges, Madame de Staël, Madame de Duras, Prosper Mérimée, and Eugène Sue. For
these authors, the slave trade was variously an object of sentiment, a moral
conundrum, or an entertaining high-seas "adventure." Turning to
twentieth-century literature and film, Miller describes how artists from Africa
and the Caribbean-including the writers Aimé Césaire, Maryse Condé, and Edouard
Glissant, and the filmmakers Ousmane Sembene, Guy Deslauriers, and Roger Gnoan
M'Bala-have confronted the aftermath of France's slave trade, attempting to
bridge the gaps between silence and disclosure, forgetfulness and
memory.
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Mar 2008 552pp 15 illus £14.99 PB
978-0-8223-4151-2