Ashley M. Williard, "Engendering Islands: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Violence in the Early French Caribbean" (U Nebraska Press, 2021)
In\xa0Engendering Islands: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Violence in the Early French Caribbean\xa0(University of Nebraska Press, 2021), Dr. Ashley M. Williard\xa0demonstrates how problematics of gender played a central role in defining colonial others, male and female, at the moment when slavery was first introduced in the French-controlled Antilles.\xa0The book argues\xa0that seventeenth-century French Caribbean reconstructions of masculinity and femininity helped sustain and justify occupation, slavery, and nascent ideas of race.\xa0In the face of historical silences, Williard\u2019s close readings of archival and narrative texts reveals the words, images, and perspectives that reflected and produced new ideas of human difference in this colonial context. Juridical, religious, and medical discourses expose the interdependence of multiple conditions\u2014male and female, enslaved and free, Black and white, Indigenous and displaced, normative and disabled\u2014in the islands claimed for the French Crown.\n\ufeffR. Grant Kleiser\xa0is a Ph.D. candidate in the Columbia University History Department. His dissertation researches the development of the free-port system in the eighteenth-century Caribbean, investigating the rationale for such moves towards \u201cfree trade\u201d and the impact these policies had on subsequent philosophers, policy-makers, and revolutionaries in the Atlantic world.\nLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices\nSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies