L'Esprit créateur, vol. 47, no 4 (hiver 2007) - Engendering Race: Romantic-Era Women and French Colonial Memory

For more than forty years, L'Esprit Créateur has published studies on French and Francophone literature, film, criticism, and culture. The journal features articles representing a variety of methodologies and critical approaches. Exploring all periods of French literature and thought, L'Esprit Créateur focuses on topics that define French and Francophone Studies today.

Vol. 47, no 4 (hiver 2007)

Prasad, Pratima
Intimate Strangers: Interracial Encounters in Romantic Narratives of Slavery
This essay examines French Romanticism's narration of colonial intimacies, considering interracial encounters in the realms of domesticity, child-rearing, kinship, friendship, and sexuality. The works studied are set in French colonies in the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean, and are authored by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, George Sand, and Alphonse de Lamartine.

Le Hir, Marie-Pierre
Marie-Adelaïde Barthélémy-Hadot's Révolte de Boston: Gender, Race, and the American Revolution
Set in America during the War of Independence, Barthélémy-Hadot's 1820 novel La Révolte de Boston reflects the author's ethical commitment to justice and equality as it explores the theme of liberation from oppression in three parallel and complementary modes: as a revolt against slavery, against political oppression, and male domination.

Cowles, Mary Jane
The Subjectivity of the Colonial Subject from Olympe de Gouges to Mme de Duras
Olympe de Gouge's L'Esclavage des noirs and Madame de Duras's Ourika address the question of subjectivity and the representation of black women under colonialization. De Gouge's protagonists express subjectivity by questioning slavery, while Ourika does so by seeking an impossible place for herself within French aristocratic society. In both cases, the problem of subjectivity revolves around the fate of a black woman's body.

Brady, Heather
Recovering Claire de Duras's Creole Inheritance: Race and Gender in the Exile Correspondence of her Saint-Domingue Family
In Une correspondance familiale (1791-1796), Madame and Monsieur de Rouvray offer abundant information about their emigration from Saint-Domingue to Philadelphia. Their letters suggest that their niece, the celebrated novelist Claire de Duras, acquired her knowledge of race and gender politics not through actual travels to Martinique but through her Saint-Domingue family.

Boutin, Aimeé
Colonial Memory, Narrative, and Sentimentalism in Desbordes-Valmore's Les Veillées des Antilles
Setting Desbordes-Valmore's Les Veillées des Antilles in the context of the nineteenth-century sentimental novella and exotic narrative, the article examines how generic hybridity in Sarah shapes colonial memory and amnesia. The poem in the novella produces discontinuities in the narrative that spur acts of remembrance and force identification with the slave.

Paliyenko, Adrianna M.
Returns of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore's Repressed Colonial Memory: "Sarah" and Critical Belatedness
Marceline Desbordes-Valmore's semi-fictionalized encounter with colonial culture in “Sarah” has not received the critical attention it merits until recently. Belatedness, in fact, marks the composition, publication, and reception of the novella. Displaced, and even replaced, by the biographical fallacy governing Desbordes-Valmore's reception, “Sarah” authorizes a reflection on slavery that challenges metropole-centric imperial history.

Jenson, Deborah
Myth, History, and Witnessing in Marceline Desbordes-Valmore's Caribbean Poetics
Marceline Desbordes-Valmore was a witness of the upheavals of the Revolutionary Caribbean in 1802. The colonial novella Sarah indirectly represents the Napoleonic reestablishment of slavery in Guadeloupe through a plot centered on confusion over who is or is not a slave, a confusion with profound historical and philosophical valences.

Kadish, Doris Y.
"Sarah" and Antislavery
This article treats Sarah as an antislavery work based on its historical context, its association with sentimental writing, its narrative and onomastic structures, and its critique of the patriarchical and paternalistic underpinnings of slavery. Similarities with “La Jambe de Damis” and changes made in the second edition are also considered.

Monroe, Cora
Authorized Autonomy: The Black Subject of La Famille noire
Sophie Doin's La Famille noire (1825) mirrors the complexity of abolitionism during the Restoration. Doin's anti-slavery, pro-black stance belies a fascinating colonialist narrative strategy that grapples with the irruption of the post-slavery, postcolonial black male subject into Western modernity by way of the Haitian Revolution.

Cooper, Barbara T.
Race, Gender, and Colonialism in Anaïs Ségalas's Récits des Antilles: Le Bois de la Soufrière
This article examines race, gender, and colonialism in Anaïs Ségalas's Les Récits des Antilles: Le Bois de la Soufrière and accounts for the racism pervading that text by setting it in the context of mid- to late nineteenth-century fictions written for children and their families by such authors as the Comtesse de Ségur.