Ventriloquizing Blackness: Citing Enslaved Africans in the French Caribbean, c.1650–1685

Abstract

Williard’s essay argues for the importance of texts coming out of the French Caribbean in the seventeenth century in accessing black lives in the early modern era. She points out that the seventeenth-century Caribbean presents a vast yet understudied network of archival and narrative traces of enslaved and free people of African descent. She examines the period c.1650–1685, a crucial time for colonial encounters and the transformation of metropolitan ideas about human difference. In particular, she examines the accounts of missionaries, who often quoted and ventriloquized their encounters with black Africans in the French Caribbean. Through those moments of representation and appropriation, Williard argues, we can glean information about how black Africans negotiated their encounters in the French Caribbean.