Sex, Sea, and Self excavates forgotten voices and their layered discourses to underscore the complexity of identity politics in the French Caribbean between 1924 and 1948. This study looks at a time of chaotic transition and renewed conflict to transform our understanding of Francophone literary canons. An emphasis on women’s experiences and feminine authorship, for instance, insists on the significance of theoretical contributions by French Antillean women intellectuals to the domain of Caribbean critical theory. However, this study also offers original approaches to works by male authors of ... More

Sex, Sea, and Self excavates forgotten voices and their layered discourses to underscore the complexity of identity politics in the French Caribbean between 1924 and 1948. This study looks at a time of chaotic transition and renewed conflict to transform our understanding of Francophone literary canons. An emphasis on women’s experiences and feminine authorship, for instance, insists on the significance of theoretical contributions by French Antillean women intellectuals to the domain of Caribbean critical theory. However, this study also offers original approaches to works by male authors of African descent. Putting in contrast Suzanne Lacascade’s, the Nardal sisters’, Mayotte Capécia’s, Jenny Alpha’s, Sully Lara’s, and Raphaël Tardon’s visions of Black humanism, history, knowledge construction, and selfhood reveals their conflicted rhetorics and performance, the ambivalent, slippery, and contradictory beliefs at the heart of their texts. These writers at times both reject and reproduce the metropolitan or white Creole exotic colonial mythology of Creole women and sexual stereotypes for their own political, cultural, and personal ends. Teasing out the politics of eroticism and the rhetoric of victimization in the expression of nation-building exposes the epistemic complicity between Black and white, colonial, and postcolonial discourses. Indeed, the social fabric of the twentieth century owes much to that of the nineteenth century, into which white Creole ideology and colonial discourse were woven. Sex, Sea, and Self (re)calibrates the canon of French Caribbean literature underpinning Caribbean critical theory, colonial history, and literary aesthetics, which allows for the exploration of novel paradigms of selfhood.