In Dangerous Creole Liaisons. I have shown that, prior to the négritude. antillanité. and créolité.ovements that each stamped the French Antilles with its own brand of identity, white Creoles fashioned erotic portrayals of black, mixed-race, and white Antillean women that functioned as metaphors for both the colonized islands and the islanders themselves. Moreover, they did so in a way that involved transatlantic negotiations and cultural crosspollinations that allowed for the French and Caribbean imaginaries to feed off one another, particularly as they produced and reproduced sexualized representations of black female bodies. The sexual exoticism disseminated in French and Caribbean literature (known today as doudouisme. exemplifies the potential toxicity of this culturally cross-pollinated discourse and its intertextual filiations. The cross-pollinated eroticization of Antillean female bodies in French literature has infiltrated the writing of French Creoles and influenced the ways in which they shape their racial and regional identities and their idea of the French nation. Between 1806 and 1897, illegitimate sexual liaisons, more than the legitimate family itself, stand at the heart of this national imagery.

Scholarly studies on Latin American literature often focus on the nineteenth-century novels that feature hetero-racial family romances. These love stories, in which a heterosexual romance is sanctioned by the heroine's free-will choice of partner, and by marriage, serve as allegories for a non-violent consolidation of the nation. By contrast, in French Caribbean literature, the female body is a battleground of disputed territory that males attempt to subjugate, often outside the sanctity of marriage, in order to assert their hegemony. The representation of femininity in white Creole discourse articulates the Antillean reality that, for both white and black men, female corporeality constitutes a collision site for opposing ideas of cultural identity and political awareness. For nineteenth-century white Creole men (békés., the female body symbolized a space of colonization and domination. Thus, for descendants of enslaved Africans in the French Antilles, the female body has come to symbolize a space of recolonization. In almost all instances, however, images of the female body establish the masculine Creole idea of a local community at once in conflict with metropolitan France's republicanism, and in collusion with the Motherland's ideas of patriarchal nationalism.