This is an impressive addition to the growing scholarship on race, enslavement, and colonization in the Atlantic World. Focusing primarily on the French Antilles in the seventeenth century, Williard contributes an intersectional and interdisciplinary account of how the French colonial project was frequently mapped out on the physical and metaphorical bodies of the European, Indigenous, and enslaved African inhabitants of the French-occupied Caribbean islands. Gender, race, and (dis)ability all coalesce in this study and Williard presents a well-researched and skillfully written account of the emerging racial discourse integral to European colonization.

Williard uses a diverse collection of sources, including church and corporate records, legal codes, formal and informal correspondences, and medical discourses, to unsilence the archives on the racial character of colonial formation and maintenance. While firmly rooted in historical context, however, Williard enhances more traditional analyses by using textual close readings to uncover metaphors of race, body, faith, and fear that permeate the colonial discourse. A particular strength of this study is Williard's successful integration of the Indigenous and enslaved contexts within the wider colonial narrative, not favoring one discussion over the other but illustrating a more accurate depiction of the complex landscape of the colonial Atlantic World. Interestingly, Engendering Islands does not stop at race and gender for investigative lenses, but Williard also incorporates disability studies, unpacking the ways that settlers quite literally entangled their perceptions of physical and moral strengths and weaknesses on the enslaved African body.

Chapter 1 positions discussions of race surrounding enslaved Africans within the context of the existing conceptions of Indigenous and settler relations in the colonies, a discourse bolstered by the significant body of travel literature Europeans produced on this topic in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This conversation is supremely religious in nature, as much of the conversation centered on what non-Christian peoples could or should be, changed or assimilated through the process of religious conversion. Chapter 2 explores how colonial wives fashioned their image as unique representatives of white femininity in the colonial space by positioning themselves as the antithesis of African women. In this chapter, Williard demonstrates the emphasis on skin color and blood purity in medical, judicial, and social dialogues.

Williard turns to masculinity in chapter 3, positing that masculinity and violence was highlighted consistently across Indigenous and African men, and sometimes women, to justify enslavement and colonialism. The final chapter further highlights the relationship between violence and colonial image-shaping by exploring how the settlers systematically sexualized the violence and resistance of enslaved people. Williard once again shows how consistently colonizers worked to criminalize the people whom they oppressed in order to justify enslavement and control. A notable inclusion in this chapter is Williard's discussion of Maroon resistance, a fascinating topic deserving more attention across scholarship.

In Engendering Islands, the body and gender are the stages on which the justifications and formulations of race, enslavement, and colonialism play out. The imagery is vivid and poignant but also grounded soundly in historical context. It is a book that contributes a fresh perspective on the early modern construction of race, one that is both specialized in its scope and yet seamlessly relevant in a larger Atlantic World framework. While the study is about colonial French Caribbean, it contributes to the scholarship enslavement, race, and colonialism more broadly. By zeroing in on this space and this thoroughly intersectional topic of gendering race, unique elements of the French colonial system are uncovered, allowing readers to question how similar methods could be applied to other colonial discourses. As Williard cogently puts it, “studying slavery exposes repressed histories and the discourses that produced them” (7).