Régine Isabelle Joseph (New York University)
Panel: Paradise or Plantation?: Unpacking the Myth with Keithley Woolward and Linda Waldron
Whether in Shakespeare’s The Tempest or in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, representations of black masculinity has often been preoccupied with the taboo of inter-racial sexual contact, often with the (libidinal) black male portrayed as sexual predator to the (virginal) white woman. The construction of the black male as sexual excess is also tied to a related construction of the white woman as sexual prey, an innocent victim with no agency over her sexual destiny. This double construction (black male predator/ white female prey) has dominated both colonial and anti-colonial discourses, from Shakespeare’s Caliban/Miranda to Frantz Fanon’s Black Man/White Woman. In both instances, the “white woman” is constructed as a subject for whom sexual desire – lust, especially, for the black man – is dangerous, discouraged, and impossible.
This paper considers the negation of white female sexuality within the discourse on black masculinity and within the context of Caribbean Tourism. For all of its brochures on the Caribbean island as paradise, tourism literature often circulates alongside embassy literature, warning white female tourists that these idyllic islands also possess a nightmarish potential as a site of rape, kidnapping, and disease. Contemporary writers Michel Houellebecq’s Platforme (2002) and Dany Laferriere’s Vers le Sud (2006) challenge the myth of the white female as sexual prey by presenting a stark and unapologetic counter-representation of Western women’s sexual agency within the discourse of the “island paradise.” Using Thailand’s Bangkok and Haiti’s Petit Goâve, each author advances a multivalent portrait of white female lust that writes back to both Shakespeare and Fanon, thereby creating a new literature. This new literature advances the island as the privileged site in which complex sexual relations are negotiated, broken, and desired, and where female identity can be reborn.
