Fictions of Whiteness: Imagining the Planter Caste in the French Caribbean Novel

Author:   Maeve McCusker
Publisher:   University of Virginia Press
ISBN:  

9780813946788


Pages:   272
Publication Date:   30 November 2021
Format:   Paperback
Availability:   In stock   Availability explained
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Fictions of Whiteness: Imagining the Planter Caste in the French Caribbean Novel


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Overview

The Antilles remain a society preoccupied with gradations of skin color and with the social hierarchies that largely reflect, or are determined by, racial identity. Yet francophone postcolonial studies have largely overlooked a key figure in plantation literature: the béké, the white Creole master. A foundational presence in the collective Antillean imaginary, the béké is a reviled character associated both with the trauma of slavery and with continuing economic dominance, a figure of desire at once fantasized and fetishized. The first book-length study to engage with the literary construction of whiteness in the francophone Caribbean, Fictions of Whiteness examines the neglected béké figure in the longer history of Antillean literature and culture. Maeve McCusker examines representation of the white Creole across two centuries and a range of ideological contexts, from early nineteenth-century békés such as Louis de Maynard and Joseph Levilloux; to canonical twentieth- and twenty-first-century novelists such as Édouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant, and Maryse Condé; extending to lesser-known authors such as Vincent Placoly and Marie-Reine de Jaham, and including entirely obscure writers such as Henri Micaux. These close analyses illuminate the contradictions and paradoxes of white identity in the Caribbean’s vieilles colonies, laboratories in which the colonial mission took shape and that remain haunted by the specter of slavery.

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Author:   Maeve McCusker
Publisher:   University of Virginia Press
Imprint:   University of Virginia Press
Weight:   0.402kg
ISBN:  

9780813946788


ISBN 10:   0813946786
Pages:   272
Publication Date:   30 November 2021
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In stock   Availability explained
We have confirmation that this item is in stock with the supplier. It will be ordered in for you and dispatched immediately.

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Sophisticated, lively, and sharp, this book is a highly original contribution to francophone Caribbean studies. --Martin Munro, Florida State University, author of Writing on the Fault Line: Haitian Literature and the Earthquake of 2010


Author Information

Maeve McCusker is Senior Lecturer of Modern Languages at Queen’s University Belfast.

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