Dangerous Creole Liaisons explores a French Caribbean context to broaden discussions of sexuality, nation building, and colonialism in the Americas. Couti examines how white Creoles perceived their contributions to French nationalism through the course of the nineteenth century as they portrayed sexualized female bodies and sexual and racial difference to advance their political ideologies. Questioning their exhilarating exoticism and titillating eroticism underscores the ambiguous celebration of the Creole woman as both seductress and an object of lust. She embodies the Caribbean as a space of desire and a political site of contest that reflects colonial, slave and post-slave societies. The under-researched white Creole writers and non-Caribbean authors (such as Lafcadio Hearn) who traveled to and wrote about these islands offer an intriguing gendering and sexualization of colonial and nationalist discourses. Their use of the floating motif of the female body as the nation exposes a cultural cross-pollination, an intense dialogue of political identity between continental France and her Caribbean colonies. Couti suggests that this cross-pollination still persists. Eventually, representations of Creole women’s bodies (white and black) bring two competing conceptions of nationalism into play: a local, bounded, French nationalism against a transatlantic and more fluid nationalism that included the Antilles in a “greater France.”

Jacqueline Couti's important book Dangerous Creole Liaisonsdemonstrates that while a politically turbulent nineteenth-century France wasdefining itself, in turns, as an empire, a monarchy, and a republic, a corpusof writers in Martinique, mainly white and heretofore little-known, wasproducing texts that both dialogued with and opposed the prevailing Frenchdiscourses of nationhood. In doing so, her study counters the received notionthat Aimé Césaire (followed by Frantz Fanon, Edouard Glissant, PatrickChamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant) was the inaugurator of a distinctivelyMartinican literature, and that his Martinican predecessors were mereimitators, in form and content, of French prose and verse. Couti writes thatbelying the "fallacy of a monolithic French colonial discourse," the writers inquestion not only divorced themselves from mere imitation, they also introduceddistinctive notions of gendered race relations and transatlantic nationalismsthat "still haunt[] the French Caribbean imaginary" and influence Martinicanidentity construction today.

Paula Sato, Kent

Dangerous Creole Liaisons is divided between exploring these issues of gender reification and initiating the reader to a neglected ‘sub-literature’, and occasionally Couti’s emphasis falls on one aspect at the expense of the other. When the two themes are juxtaposed, however, the study provides a fascinating argument on the construction of French Caribbean identity and colonial stereotypes. As Couti herself states in her conclusion, her work opens the way for new debates in the field of French Caribbean literature and Francophone postcolonial studies.
Vanessa Lee, Bulletin of Francophone Postcolonial Studies