Fictions of Whiteness : Imagining the Planter Caste in the French Caribbean Novel

The Antilles remain a society obsessed with gradations of skin color, and with the social hierarchies that largely reflect, or are determined by, racial identity. As they are ex-slave colonies, a substantial body of literary research has been done on négritude; créolité, postcolonialsim, the Maroon, etc., to the neglect of a key figure in plantation literature: the béké-the white Creole master and his/her descendants. Yet the béké is a foundational presence in the collective Antillean imaginary: a reviled character associated with both the trauma of slavery and with continuing and pronounced economic dominance, s/he is at the same time a phantasized and fetishized figure of desire.

In order to explore the neglected figure of the béké in the most comprehensive terms, and to address the gaps in scholarship identified above, McCusker examines the longer history of Antillean literature (beginning with early nineteenth century békés such as Maynard and Bonneville), works through to established twentieth and twenty-first-century writers (Chamoiseau; Confiant; Condé), and broadens the scope of analysis to include less-studied authors such as Placoly, Micaux, and Jaham, so as to interrogate the representation of the white Creole in a range of ideological contexts.