The Antillean Jewel and the European Imaginary: The Language of the Unspeakable in Denis Diderot's Les bijoux indiscrets

Abstract

In the mid-1700s, when Denis Diderot wrote Les bijoux indiscrets, the French modern nation-state was being actively imagined through philosophical and revolutionary discourse as distinct from the monarchical and feudal structures of the ancien régime. At the core of the emerging, transformative vision of Enlightenment thought lay knowledge produced by colonial and enslaved peoples, symbolized in the black female body that is positioned in Diderot's novel as disruptive of and yet central to European social, economic, and cultural norms.