The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean

Doris Garraway The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005, xvi + 412 pp.

In The Libertine Colony, Doris Garraway, Professor of French at Northwestern University, presents a historically contextualized and theoretically informed analysis of published narratives beginning with France's entry into colonial slavery in the Caribbean in the 1640s through the onset of the Haitian Revolution in the 1790s. Focusing on regimes of violence and structures of power, desire, and intimacies, Garraway investigates what she refers to as "a productive paradox in recent theories of creolization" (1). Calling attention to the role of …