The French Atlantic Triangle: acute or obtuse?

Abstract

Christopher L Miller’s The French Atlantic Triangle is a colossal book introducing readers to the cultural works of metropolitan France and its overseas territories in the Americas and Africa, produced over the last four centuries. Following in the steps of Gilroy’s largely Anglophone and Northern Hemisphere-focused The Black Atlantic, Miller’s work foregrounds the need to pay close attention to other imperial, linguistic and diasporic triangulated networks in this oceanic contact zone. The end result is an impressive and groundbreaking introduction to a new field that nevertheless skims the surface and avoids mapping some of the more challenging and uncharted depths of the cultural production of the French Atlantic. Aware of these lacunae, the author opens a space for others to deepen the study of this region and, in a wonderful feat of altruism, provides in the conclusion some practical suggestions on how subsequent generations of scholars may further this work. Each of the four parts could very well have been packaged as a separate book, making one wonder whether the volume is thorough and comprehensive or just too broad in its thematic and chronological scope to be truly manageable. Ambitiously, the author affords his readers four chapters on ‘The French Atlantic’, four on ‘French Women Writers’, four on ‘French Male Writers’, two on ‘African and Caribbean writers’, nearly 150 pages of detailed notes, and an exhaustive bibliography. The volume achieves unity through the deployment of Cesaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal as a leitmotif and through the careful, almost novelistic inter-textual stitching of the chapters. It also achieves unity through restraint. The logical lure to include relevant material from the Indian Ocean francophone territories in an already overflowing work on the Atlantic is a temptation that Miller manages aptly. His book reaches climactic peaks in two particular sets of chapters. Chapters Seven and Nine are quite possibly the finest examples of applied cultural studies work in current francophone studies. In Chapter Seven, Miller superbly synthesizes the exotic names of various protagonists associated with slavery in the works of Montesquieu, Voltaire, Saint-Lambert,