Francophone Romance, Love, Sex, Intimacy In The French Colonial World

As recent scholarship on empire has shown, colonial domination and violence have often been accompanied by various forms of intimacy. In this course we consider the different ways in which love, desire and household and family relationships have emerged as questions in the French colonial context from the age of plantation slavery to the era of decolonization. The material spans the history and geography of the French empire. We consider works from the Caribbean, Louisiana, Vietnam and the Maghreb, considering both the transmission of categories and practices across colonial contexts and historical and regional specificities. Our primary lens is that of literature, but we also draw on other sources and on insights from history, sociology, law and other disciplines.