Fictions of Whiteness: Imagining the Planter Caste in the French Caribbean Novel

The Antilles remain a society preoccupied with gradations of skin color and with the social hierarchies that largely reflect, or are determined by, racial identity. Yet francophone postcolonial studies have largely overlooked a key figure in plantation literature: the béké, the white Creole master. A foundational presence in the collective Antillean imaginary, the béké is a reviled character associated both with the trauma of slavery and with continuing economic dominance, a figure of desire at once fantasized and fetishized.
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