Engendering Islands: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Violence in the Early French Caribbean by Ashley Williard

Abstract

Reviewed by: Engendering Islands: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Violence in the Early French Caribbean by Ashley Williard Virginie Ems-Bléneau Williard, Ashley. Engendering Islands: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Violence in the Early French Caribbean. UP of Nebraska, 2021. ISBN 978-1-4962-2024-0. Pp. 294. France's national narrative has denied, or at the very least downplayed, its active participation in the slave trade and slavery for centuries. Today, public discourse still tends to point the finger to England or the United States for ruthlessly displacing and exploiting Africans in the pursuit of wealth and glory. "There were no slaves in France," a phrase repeated in many classrooms to highlight France's intellectual and ideological superiority following the Enlightenment. Engendering Islands will serve as an astute reminder that France, too, owes its current influence and wealth to the enslavement of Black bodies. The title's reference to gender illustrates Williard's approach: she shows how France constructed gender and race to meet the needs of the plantation economy in the French Caribbean of the seventeenth century. European binary definitions of gender (male vs. female) and race (European vs. non-European) evolved to take into account the new realities of colonial life. If masculinity for European men had signified courage and agency, this interpretation could no longer be applied to non-European men whose basic rights were systematically denied. Colonial society therefore deployed new racially-informed definitions of masculinity. Colonial publications discursively constructed the masculinity of African men as dangerous and violent to justify literal and symbolic emasculation. Furthermore, colonial narratives also reinvented femininity along racial lines. While planters were happily marrying Creole women due to the scarcity of European girls on the islands at the beginning of the period regardless of their skin tone, concerns over blood purity and morality engendered a shift in what would be considered desirable in a bride. Whiteness and religious education thus became the standards by which all women would be judged. In the context of colonial expansion, one might be lured into thinking that women and non-Whites were the primary targets of colonial control. The section on pirates and buccaneers shows, on the contrary, that any digression from the newly established gender norms proved threatening to the power structure. Pirates operated outside of the rules of society on several levels, including in their refusal to bind themselves to plantation society through a wife and a plot of land. Indeed, crew members formed homosocial partnerships called matelotage, which replaced patrilineal inheritance and ensured the wellbeing of wounded freebooters. These non-normative unions threatened colonial order so much that the Crown attempted to sever these bonds by using land, slaves, and women to entice sailors to settle down. While Williard reports that these tactics were ultimately unsuccessful, an analysis of the long-term consequences of such resistance would have been extremely interesting, and could be the object of further research. Although the overall scope of the book is not particularly [End Page 222] novel, this volume is well-written and thoroughly documented, making it a useful reference book for the study of race and gender in the early modern French Caribbean. [End Page 223] Virginie Ems-Bléneau Georgia Southern University Copyright © 2023 American Association of Teachers of French