Cannibalizing paradise: Suzanne Césaire’s ecofeminist critique of tourist literature

Abstract

This paper considers the ecofeminist geopoetics of Suzanne Césaire, developed over the course of seven essays that appeared in Martinican literary journal, Tropiques. Césaire deploys a ‘cannibalizing’ method aimed at subverting colonialist-utopian fantasies of the Antilles that cast them as inviting, penetrable spaces for European colonists and pleasure-seekers. I suggest that Césaire enlists the chaotic, often destructive forces of Caribbean climate to create a resistant geopoetics that opposes paradisal and sexualized visions of the tropics in travel literature. Yet, rather than simply activating the dystopian and disastrous antipode of Edenic paradise, Césaire diffuses the dialectical tension between utopia/dystopia, instead grounding the emergence of an unassimilated identity in the region’s geo-climatic dynamism. I argue that Césaire’s valorization of instability as a defining feature of Caribbean culture and geography impedes the reification of islands as either utopic paradises ripe for consumption or dystopian hotspots in need of technological rationalization and control. While Césaire’s work has been largely left out of studies on postcolonial theory, ecocriticism, and Caribbean women’s writing, I suggest that her essays demonstrate a latent ecofeminism, allowing her to subvert gendered, exoticized representations of Caribbean islands used to justify continued environmental exploitation, development, and neocolonial control.