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

Abstract

The French Caribbean islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe were colonised by the French as far back as 1635. These early French settlers became the owners and masters of the sugar cane plantations, where Black enslaved people were subjected to brutal treatment. White plantation owners were colloquially known as ‘béké’ (the term ‘blanc pays’ was more common in Guadeloupe, but ‘béké’ was also used) and they made up approximately ten to fifteen percent of the Antillean population. While their numbers have since dwindled (today their descendants account for only one percent of the population), they continue to hold political and economic power on the islands. Despite their importance in local politics and economic activities, and their prominence in the cultural imaginary of Antilleans as a presence to be both feared and fetishized, there is a surprising lack of scholarship on literary representations of the béké figure. Maeve McCusker aims to correct this with her fascinating new study, Fictions of Whiteness: Imagining the Planter Caste in the French Caribbean . The book studies how the béké have been represented in novels written by both béké and non-béké writers. It takes a broadly chronological approach through these texts, beginning with little-known nineteenth-century writers such as Auguste-Jean Prévost de Sansac, count of Traversay