Re-reading the French Early Modern Caribbean: Decolonial Challenges
Guest lecture by Christina Kullberg, Professor of French, at Uppsala University. All interested are welcome.
Abstract:
This talk draws from my book Points of Entanglement in French Caribbean Travel Writing (1620-1722) (Palgrave Macmillan 2023). The book argues for a literary reexamination of the representation of the early colonial Caribbean. Taking a synoptic approach to travel narratives in French, from 1620 up to the publication of Labat’s Nouveaux voyages (1722), it excavates traces of local impacts by examining textual instances where the islands and the peoples of this period unsettle dominant French narratives. The claim here is that the historical, social, and political messiness of the Caribbean seventeenth century make for complex representations and expressions, generating textual instability despite the travelers’ apparent desires to domesticate the islands. Between the lines of these authoritarian narratives, disruptive elements coming from indigenous and enslaved peoples along with the archipelagic geography enter productively into the construction of knowledge and indeed the representations of this world. This book’s contribution is to read these texts in situ in order to interrogate both the formation and the limitations of discourses of power. In my talk I will situate the travel narratives in their historical context and discuss the theoretical challenges of reading early modern literature through the lens of twentieth century Caribbean thought, decolonial theories, and early modern race studies.
