D'Eichthal and Urbain's Lettres sur la race noire et la race blanche: race, gender, and reconciliation after Slave Emancipation
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
Spring 2011
Publisher
University of Nebraska Press
Abstract
This article is a close reading of Gustave D'Eichthal and Ishmayl Urbain's Lettres sur la race noire et la race blanche (1839), written during the decade prior to the "second" French emancipation in 1848. The article argues that the hierarchical gendering of race described in the letters is reflective of metropolitan concerns about potential for social disorder accompanying slave emancipation in the French colonies. In arguing for social reconciliation through interracial marriage and its offspring, the symbolically charged figure of the mulatto, the authors deployed gendered and familial language to describe a stable post-emancipation society.
Recommended Citation
Andrews, N. J. (2011). D’Eichthal and Urbain’s Lettres sur la race noire et la race blanche: Race, Gender, and Reconciliation after Slave Emancipation. Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 39(3), 240–258. http://doi.org/10.1353/ncf.2011.0037
