Inside the Barrel

Letters

Vol. 31 No. 20 · 22 October 2009

From Christopher Miller

Brent Hayes Edwards’s review of my book The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade may leave readers confused (LRB, 10 September). He recognises my ‘insistence that the Atlantic was above all a space of translation’, and that ‘many of [my] examples involve encounters between empires, and patterns of influence that cross the language barrier.’ But at the same time, he says that I ‘mostly avoid . . . writing about the Atlantic as a site of cultural contact and confrontation between the European powers’. Which is it? I do not know what vision of the French Atlantic slave trade Edwards would propose, but his suggestion that ‘if there is a French Atlantic’ – does he want to argue that no such thing existed? – ‘it is defined only by its contacts and confrontations with the British Atlantic’ is, at best, a strange exaggeration. Edwards puzzles over the word ‘French’ in my title, wondering if there really is ‘something identifiably “French” – aside from the language of composition – about the literature and culture of this part of the slave trade’. The ships, the investors, the money, the islands to which the captives were taken, the profits from their labours – all were French. More important, the literary culture that I analyse during the period of the trade was surely French in more than just language.

Christopher Miller
Yale