Cover not available

In:A Comparative Literary History of Modern Slavery: The Atlantic world and beyond
Edited by Karen-Margrethe Simonsen, Madeleine Dobie and Mads Anders Baggesgaard
[Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages XXXVII] 2025
► pp. 270–294

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload Book PDF
EPUB logo with download linkDownload Book EPUB
authorization required

Chapter 15
Contradicting histories, memories, fictions

A bricolage of slavery in the early-modern French Caribbean

Published online: 29 April 2025
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/chlel.37.15sta
Abstract
Now that the debates between history and memory have subsided, their similarities become clearer, notably that history depends on memory for data and evidence. Often ignored, texts that depict seventeenth century French-Caribbean slavery are not only historical and memorial (letters and diaries), but fictive in part as well (Relations, ethnographies and travel narratives). This hybrid corpus is replete with unfilled, perhaps unfillable gaps; and yet it is marked by two salient contradictions: etiological tensions between the empire’s goals of conversion vs commerce; and conflicts regarding slaves’ ontological status as thing or human — both contradictions may function within the corpus’s textual unconscious. Today, Caribbean descendants of enslaved African persons work to fill (but never close) the traumatic, haunting aporias of history-and-memory through writerly reimaginings. Chamoiseau inscribes this individual and collective quest with his own uncertainties and contradictions.
Article outline
  • The etiology of enslavement: Commerce versus conversion
  • Ontologies of the enslaved: Property or person
  • Notes
  • References
References (82)
References
Aubert, Guillaume. 2004. “‘The Blood of France’: Race and Purity of Blood in the French Atlantic World.” The William and Mary Quarterly 61 (3): 439–78. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2013. “To Establish One Law and Definite Rules: Race, Religion and the Transatlantic Origins of the Louisiana Code.” In Louisiana: Crossroads of the Atlantic World, edited by Cécile Vidal, 21–43. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Benjamin, Walter. 1969. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, 253–64. New York: Schocken.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bernier, François. 1684. “Nouvelle division de la terre par les differentes especes ou races d’hommes qui l’habitent, envoyée par un fameux voyager à M. l’Abbé de la ***** à peu prés en ces termes.” Journal des savants 12: 133–40.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Blackburn, Robin. 2010. The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800. London: Verso.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bodin, Jean. 1576. Les six livres de la république. Paris: Chez Jacques du Puys.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bordin, Elisa and Anne Scacchi, eds. 2015. Transatlantic Memories of Slavery. Amherst: Cambria Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bossuet, Jacques Bénigne. 1863. “Cinquième avertissement aux protestants sur les lettres du ministre Jurieu contre L’histoire des variations .” In Oeuvres complètes, vol. 15, 467–68. Paris: Louis Vives.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bouton, Jacques. 1640. Relation de l’establissement des Francois depuis l’an 1635 en l’isle de la Martinique, l’une des Antilles de l’Amerique. Paris: Chez Sebastien Cramoisy. Gallica.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Chamoiseau, Patrick. 1997. L’esclave vieil homme et le molosse. Paris: Gallimard.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2007. Un dimanche au cachot. Paris: Gallimard.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2013. “De la mémoire obscure à la mémoire consciente.” In De l’esclavage aux réparations: les textes clés d’hier et d’aujourd’hui, edited by Jean-Louis Tin, 109–16. Paris: Petits Matins.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Chatillon, Marcel. 1984. L’évangélisation des esclaves au XVIIe siècle — Lettres du R.P. Jean Mongin. Bulletin de la Société d’Histoire de la Guadeloupe 61–62 (3e trimestre, 4e trimestre): 3–136. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cohen, William B. 2003. The French Encounter with Africans. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cottias, Myriam. 1998. “La politique de l’oubli.” France-Antilles: Supplément-Edition (Guadeloupe), May 25.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Curran, Andrew. 2011. Anatomy of Blackness. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Daher, Andrea. 2018. “The Capucin Invention of the Savage in Modern Era.” Revista de Historia 177: 2–30.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Danon, Rachel. 2015. Les voix du marronnage dans la littérature française du XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Classiques Garnier.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Debien, Gabriel. 1974. Les esclaves aux Antilles Françaises: xviie-xviiie siècles. Guadeloupe: Société d’Histoire de la Guadeloupe.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
De Lamet, Adrien Augustin and Germain Fromageau. 1740. “Esclaves.” In Le dictionnaire des cas de conscience. 1: 1080–84. Paris: Aux Dépens de la Compagnie. Gallica.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Delbée, François sieur de. 1671. Journal du voyage du Sr. Delbée aux isles, dans la coste de Guinée. Paris: Gervais Clozier.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Derrida, Jacques. 1993. Spectres de Marx. Paris: Galilée.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1995. Mal d’archive. Paris: Galilée.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2004. Eyes of the University. Edited by Werner Hamacher and David E. Wellbery. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Du Tertre, Jean-Baptiste. 1654. Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les François. Paris: Thomas Jolly. Gallica.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1667. Histoire générale… Paris: Chez Thomas Iolly. Gallica.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Froger, François, Le Sieur. 1698. Relation d’un voyage fait en 1695, 1696, & 1697, aux Côtes d’Afrique… & Isles Antilles. Paris: Chez Michel Brumet. Gallica.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gaby, Jean-Baptiste (Monsieur de N***). 1689. Relation de la Nigritie. Paris: E. Couterot. Google Books.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Garraway, Doris. 2005. The Libertine Colony. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2006. “Toward a Creole Myth of Origins: Narrative, Foundations and Eschatology in Patrick Chamoiseau’s L’esclave, vieil homme et le molosse .” Callaloo 29 (1, Winter): 151–67. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Glissant, Edouard. 1964. Le quatrième siècle. Paris: Gallimard.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gordon, Avery F. 1997. Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gray, Richard. 1987. “The Papacy and the Atlantic Slave Trade: Lourenço da Silva, the Capuchins and the Decisions of the Holy Office.” Past and Present 115: 52–68. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Grotius, Hugo. 2005. The Rights of War and Peace. Edited by Richard Tuck. 1625. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Grunberg, Bernard, Benoît Roux, and Josiane Grunberg, eds. 2013. Voyageurs anonymes aux Antilles. Paris: L’Harmattan.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hanke, Lewis. 1949. The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Harrigan, Michael. 2018. Frontiers of Servitude: Slavery in Narratives of the Early French Atlantic. Manchester: Manchester University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hirsch, Marianne. 2012. “The Generation of Postmemory.” In The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust, 29–53. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ibbett, Katherine. 2018. Compassion’s Edge: Fellow-Feeling and Its Limits in Early Modern France. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jameson, Frederic. 1981. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jenkins, Keith and Alan Munslow, eds. 2004. The Nature of History Reader. New York: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kempner, Wendy. 2012. Patrick Chamoiseau: A Critical Introduction. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Labat, Jean-Baptiste. 1722. Nouveau voyage aux isles de l’Amérique…. Paris: Chez Guillaume Cavalier.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1744. Nouveau voyage… Paris: Chez Guillaume Cavalier.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
LaCapra, Dominick. 1998. History and Memory after Auschwitz. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2018. Understanding Others. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
La Courbe, Le Sieur de. [1685] 1913. Premier voyage faite à la coste d’Afrique en 1685. Paris: Edouard Champion.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Laqueur, Thomas W. 2000. “Introduction: Grounds for Remembering.” Representations 69 (Winter): 1–8. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Le Goff, Jacques. 1992. Memory and History. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lemaire, Sieur. 1695. Les voyages … aux iles Canaries, Cap-Verd, Senegal et Gambie. Paris: Jacques Collombiet.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lenik, Stephan. 2011. “Mission Plantations, Space and Social Control: Jesuits as Planters in French Caribbean Colonies and Frontiers.” Journal of Social Archeology 12 (1): 51–71. Sage Premier 2018.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1962. La pensée sauvage. Paris: Plon.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
McCusker, Maeve. 2007. Patrick Chamoiseau: Recovering Memory. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mihai, Stelian. 2013. “History and Collective Memory: The Succeeding Incarnations of an Evolving Relationship.” Philobiblon 18 (2): 260–82.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Moirans, Epiphane de (born ‘Dunot’ in France; in Spanish, Epifanio de Moirans) [1682] 2007. A Just Defense of the Natural Freedom of Slaves: All Slaves Should be Free. Edited and translated from the Latin by Edward R. Sunshine. Bilingual Critical Edition. New York: Edwin Mellen.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Morgan, Jennifer. 2004. Laboring Women. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Morrison, Toni. 1987. Beloved. New York: Knopf.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1995. “The Site of Memory.” In Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, 2nd ed., edited by William Zinsser. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 83–102.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1989. “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature.” Michigan Quarterly Review. Arts and Humanities Journal 28 (1): 1–34.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Nelson, Eric. 2014. “Remembering the Martyrdom of St Francis of Paola: History, Memory and Minimal Identity in Seventeenth-Century France.” History and Memory 26 (2, Fall/Winter): 76–105. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Nesbitt, Nick. 2003. Voicing Memory: History and Subjectivity in French Caribbean Literature. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Nora, Pierre. 1989. “Between Memory and History: Les lieux de mémoire .” Representations 26 (Spring): 7–24. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Peabody, Sue. 2002a. “‘A Dangerous Zeal’: Catholic Missions to Slaves in the French Antilles, 1635–1800.” French Historical Studies 25 (1): 53–90. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2002b. There Are No Slaves in France. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Peabody, Sue and Keila Grinberg. 2006. Slavery, Freedom and the Law in the Atlantic World: A Brief History with Documents. New York: St Martin’s.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pelleprat, Le P. Pierre. 1655. Relation des missions des Pères de la Compagnie de Jésus. Paris: Chez Sebastien Cramoisy et Gabriel.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pritchard, James. 2004. In Search of Empire: The French in the Americas, 1670–1730. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ricoeur, Paul. 2006. Memory, History, Forgetting. Chicago: Chicago University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Robinson, Cedric. 1983. Black Marxism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rushforth, Brett. 2012. Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Saint Michel, Maurile de. 1652. Voyage des isles camercanes en l’Amérique. Mans: Hierôme Olivier.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sala-Molins, Louis, ed. 1987. Le Code Noir (1685). Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Savary, Jacques. [1675] 1726. Le parfait négociant ou Instruction générale pour ce qui regarde le commerce des marchandises de France & des païs etrangers, 8th ed. 1675. Amsterdam: Jansons à Waresberge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Schramm, Katharina. 2011. “Introduction: Landscapes of Violence: Memory and Sacred Space.” History & Memory 23 (1, Spring/Summer): 5–22. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Scott, James C. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sicher, Efraim. 2000. “The Future of the Past: Countermemory and Postmemory in Contemporary American Post-Holocaust Narratives.” History & Memory 12 (2, Fall/Winter): 56–91. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Simonsen, Karen-Margrethe. 2013. “The Politics of Universalism: Strategic Uses of Human Rights Discourse in Early Modernity.” Journal of Aesthetics & Culture 5: 1–12. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
White, Hayden. 1982. “Getting out of History.” Diacritics 12 (3, Autumn): 2–13. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1973. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Winter, Jay. 2001. “The Memory Boom in Contemporary Historical Studies.” Raritan 21 (1, Summer): 52–66.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Young, James E. 1997a. “Between History and Memory: The Uncanny Voices of Historian and Survivor.” History and Memory 9 (1/2, Fall): 47–58. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
1997b. “Toward a Received History of the Holocaust.” History and Theory 36 (4, December): 21–43. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue