Monsters and Revolutionaries: Colonial Family Romance and Metissage (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780822322948)

In Monsters and Revolutionaries Fran輟ise Verg鑚 analyzes the complex relationship between the colonizer and colonized on the Indian Ocean island of R騏nion. Through novels, iconography, and texts from various disciplines including law, medicine, and psychology, Verg鑚 constructs a political and cultural history of the island's relations with France. Woven throughout is Verg鑚's own family history, which is intimately tied to the history of R騏nion itself.
Originally settled by sugar plantation owners and their Indian and African slaves following a seventeenth-century French colonial decree, R騏nion abolished slavery in 1848. Because plantation owners continued to import workers from India, Africa, Asia, and Madagascar, the island was defined as a place based on mixed heritages, or m騁issage. Verg鑚 reads the relationship between France and the residents of R騏nion as a family romance: France is the seemingly protective mother, La M鑽e-Patrie, while the people of R騏nion are seen and see themselves as France's children. Arguing that the central dynamic in the colonial family romance is that of debt and dependence, Verges explains how the republican ideals of the French Revolution and the Enlightenment are seen as gifts to R騏nion that can never be repaid. This dynamic is complicated by the presence of m騁issage, a source of anxiety to the colonizer in its refutation of the "purity" of racial bloodlines. For Verg鑚, the island's history of slavery is the key to understanding m騁issage, the politics of assimilation, constructions of masculinity, and emancipatory discourses on R騏nion.

Author: Fran輟ise Verg鑚
ISBN-10: 0822322943
ISBN-13: 9780822322948
Publisher: Duke University Press
Language: English
Published: 06/11/1999
Pages: 416
Format: Paperback
Weight: 1.46lbs
Size: 8.97h x 5.85w x 1.22d