Dangerous Creole Liaisons examines the neglected corpus of white Creole writers from the French Caribbean and how their discourse has been reappropriated to expose the significant role these men played in the construction of blackness, French nationalism and culture.

Dangerous Creole Liaisons examines the neglected corpus of white Creole writers from the French Caribbean and how their discourse has been reappropriated to expose the significant role these men played in the construction of blackness, French nationalism and culture.

Sex, Sea, and Self reassesses the place of the French Antilles and French Caribbean literature within current postcolonial thought and visions of the Black Atlantic. Using a feminist lens, this study examines neglected twentieth-century French texts by Black writers from Martinique and Guadeloupe, making the analysis of some of these texts available to readers of English for the first time. This interdisciplinary study of female and male authors reconsiders their political strategies and the critical role of French creoles in the creation of their own history. This approach recalibrates overly simplistic understandings of the victimization and alienation of French Caribbean people. In the systems of cultural production under consideration, sexuality constitutes an instrument of political and cultural consciousness in the chaotic period between 1924 and 1948. Studying sexual imagery constructed around female bodies demonstrates the significance of agency and the legacy of the past in cultural resistance and political awareness. Sex, Sea, and Self particularly highlights Antillean women intellectuals' theoretical contributions to Caribbean critical theory. Therefore, this analysis illuminates debates on the multifaceted and conflicted relationships between France and its overseas departments and expands ideas of nationhood in the Black Atlantic and the Americas.

Black French Women and the Struggle for Equality, 1848-2016 explores how black women in France itself, the French Caribbean, Gorée, Dakar, Rufisque, and Saint-Louis experienced and reacted to French colonialism and how gendered readings of colonization, decolonization, and social movements cast new light on the history of French colonization and of black France. In addition to delineating the powerful contributions of black French women in the struggle for equality, contributors also look at the experiences of African American women in Paris and in so doing integrate into colonial and postcolonial conversations the strategies black women have engaged in negotiating gender and race relations à la française. Drawing on research by scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds and countries, this collection offers a fresh, multidimensional perspective on race, class, and gender relations in France and its former colonies, exploring how black women have negotiated the boundaries of patriarchy and racism from their emancipation from slavery to the second decade of the twenty-first century.

A groundbreaking collective biography narrating the history of emancipation through the life stories of women of African descent in the Americas.

Entangled Otherness explores the dynamics of cross-dressing and gender performance in contemporary francophone Caribbean cultures through a range of visual and textual media. Original in its comparative focus on the islands of Haiti, Martinique, Guadeloupe and their diasporic communities in France, this study reveals how opaque strategies of crossing, mimicry and masquerade have enabled resistance to the racialised, gendered and patriarchal classifications of bodies that characterized Enlightenment thought during the French transatlantic slave trade. It engages with archival texts of pre-revolutionary Haiti to offer a historical understanding of current constructions of Caribbean gender most influenced by French colonial legacies. The author argues that cross-dressing, as a form of 'self-fabrication', complicates inherently entangled colonial binaries of identity and resists France's paternalistic gaze. The book's multidisciplinary approach to gender analysis weaves a dialogue between cross-cultural voices garnered from textual and historical analysis, ethnographic interviews and theoretical insight to foreground the continued need to decolonize Eurocentric readings of gender identity in the francophone and creolophone islands, and the Caribbean region more generally. Works of art, film, photography, carnival, performance, and dress, including depictions of fluid identities in the binary-resistant Afro-Creole religion of Vodou, are examined using contemporary performance, gender and social theory from within the region. Entangled Otherness thus makes a unique and timely contribution to the growing body of knowledge and debate in the areas of gender, sexuality and the body in Caribbean Studies.