Warring Emotions: Anger, Settler Colonialism and Racecraft in Sixteenth-Century Florida

Abstract

This is an emotional history of an emotional alliance of French and Indigenous warriors who united to avenge the Spanish massacre of the Huguenot Fort Caroline in Florida in 1565. In this alliance, Indigenous fury was normalised when it served French Protestant interests. However, Protestant representations of Spanish and Indigenous rage used for the black legend presently came to found racist arguments for structural violence in settler colonialism and American white supremacy that are gendered and rooted in bodies. To explain, this essay sets this revenge story within the logics of the sixteenth-century French emotional regime.