Curtis on Kadish (2012)

After many years of neglect, colonialism and slavery have become increasingly popular topics of research among scholars of French Studies. Beginning in the 1990s, Doris Kadish astutely noted that a lack of attention to women writers was a lacuna in this burgeoning field; she has been a pioneer in bringing the study of women's writing to the examination of French colonial literature ever since. Her new book, Fathers, Daughters, and Slaves: Women Writers and French Colonial Slavery, continues this important work through a combination of historical, biographical and literary analysis.

Kadish's introduction establishes the theoretical framework for her study, which examines the writings of Germaine de Staël (1766-1817), Charlotte Dard (1798-1862), Marceline Desbordes-Valmore (1786-1859), Claire de Duras (1777-1828), and Sophie Doin (1800-46). Kadish maintains a consistent theme in her work on gender and slavery, which is that nineteenth-century French women write about the enslaved from a more empathetic perspective than do their male counterparts. This argument has been the subject of controversy in the past, but Fathers, Daughters, and Slaves responds to previous criticism through historical contextualization, a broadening of theoretical sources and an insistence on the necessity of bringing French women into a renewed analysis of antislavery thought. The book's interwoven analyses of literature, history, and biography offer a compelling account of the philosophically-complicated nature of these five authors' understanding of race and gender. The emphasis that Fathers, Daughters, and Slaves places on the importance of fathers, both biological and fictitious, further develops its larger argument for the complexity of the relationship between oppression based on gender and that based on race within the confines of patriarchal society.

Fathers, Daughters, and Slaves works to expand the study of abolitionism as a particular area of French political thought by accounting for the constraints placed upon women writers at the time and by foregrounding how those limits have continued to influence the reception and study of their work. Kadish establishes the indispensable nature of her book's project by asserting that the denigration of these five women as writers of lesser-quality works has translated into a limited understanding of French abolitionism in general. The book's analysis of five women authors in conversation with Caribbean authors also defies, Kadish claims, the tendency to assume a facile distinction between "men and women or whites and blacks" (20). This theoretical position also asserts a connection between nineteenth-century and present-day notions of freedom and equality, and further establishes the relevance of studying gender, colonialism and race as interconnected.

Two of the authors studied in this book, Claire de Duras and Germaine de Staël, have received much attention in recent years; Kadish contributes to this corpus of expanding scholarship by providing her readers with new analyses relating Staël's and Duras's fathers, families and conceptions of family to their writings about people of African descent. Kadish also studies lesser-known writers: Charlotte Dard, the author of a memoir about her experience on the Medusa, which shipwrecked off the coast of Africa in 1816; Sophie Doin, a radical Christian abolitionist; and Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, who is more well-known as a poet than as a writer of the colonial works inspired by her voyage to Guadeloupe at the time of Napoleon's re-establishment of slavery in 1802. Though some of the authors included in this book have not been respected as writers of high literature, Kadish establishes the scholarly value of her corpus by asserting that the intellectual and personal details of each writer's life are equally rich in information about French colonial thought and action. Fathers, Daughters, and Slaves opens up a space for examining a wider corpus of works related to slavery, race and difference by taking these five authors' writings and life experiences seriously as significant sources of insight about personal and colonial events that shaped France's understanding of its position in the world.