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Part of
A Comparative Literary History of Modern Slavery: The Atlantic world and beyond
Edited by Madeleine Dobie, Mads Anders Baggesgaard and Karen-Margrethe Simonsen
[Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages XXXVI] 2024
► pp. 278–294

Chapter 15
Scenes of emotion in French early-modern travel writing from the Caribbean

Du Tertre, Mongin, Labat

This chapter examines the inclusion of voices of the enslaved in seventeenth-century French travel writing to the Caribbean by looking at three missionaries writing at different moments of the French settlement and the early colonization: Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les François (1654 and 1667–71), written by the Dominican missionary Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre; Jesuit missionary Jean Mongin’s letters on the evangelization of slaves, written in the 1680s; and Dominican Jean-Baptiste Labat’s Nouveau voyage aux Isles de l’Amérique, from his stay in Martinique between 1694 and 1706. It makes the argument that while commerce and profit were unquestionably the main motivations for allowing and sustaining slavery, travelogues also play on another, emotional register when representing slavery. The aim of the chapter is to interrogate the factors underpinning this representational strategy and in so doing to draw conclusions about how the techniques and motivations for including voices changed as slavery was gradually naturalized in the Caribbean.
Keywords: early modern Caribbean, travel writing, slavery, Du Tertre, Labat, Mongin, French literature, Francophone studies
Article outline
  • Du Tertre: Voicing contradictions
  • Mongin: The divine voices of the enslaved
  • Labat: Controlling speech and emotions
  • Concluding remarks
  • Author queries
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
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