The Dominican missionary Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre (1610–87) and his magnum opus the Histoire générale des Antilles (1654) are no strangers to students of French Caribbean history. Christina Kullberg, professor of French literature at the University of Uppsala, has now undertaken the first comprehensive literary analysis of this important text. Her re-lecture of Du Tertre aims to historically contextualize his account of the Antilles as well as critically examine his usage of the concept of exoticism. Kullberg thus joins a group of scholars, including Tzvetan Todorov, Frank Lestringant, Stephen Greenblatt, and Michel de Certeau, who have written about the exoticizing gaze of European travelers in colonial America.

Du Tertre's account of the islands differs from other travelogues before his. As Kullberg argues, he does not adhere to a logic or grammar of difference. Rather than postulating figures of the absolute Other, his narrative mediates between the extremes of the known and unknown, the pleasant and the horrible, paradise and savagery, all to justify a new French colonial order that was supposed to overcome all differences (8).

Kullberg's book is divided into three parts and ten chapters. The first part puts Du Tertre and his three editions of the Histoire générale into the context of the first attempts to establish colonies in America, which from the 1620s onwards were mainly private enterprises to establish a proprietary system of landownership on the islands of Saint Christophe (today's Saint-Kitts), Guadeloupe, and Martinique. Since the royal administration had little control over these establishments Kullberg seems to overemphasize the state's ambition when she speaks of “French imperialism” (26). Instead, it was only after the economic reforms under Jean-Baptiste Colbert that a “colonial project” took shape. Du Tertre, however, could not have witnessed such a state-controlled colonialism. His experience of the colonial process was one of precariousness and always looming disaster. Kullberg's reconstruction of the path taken by Du Tertre's oeuvre through the French literary society around 1650 reveals the entanglement of its foremost members in colonial affairs. The poet Paul Scarron, for example, fled to the Antilles during the Fronde and later married the Martiniquaise Françoise d'Aubigne, future Marquise de Maintenon, spouse of Louis XIV. Together Scarron and Françoise ventured to establish a colony on an island north of Cayenne, one of many projects never realized (53f).

The second part deals with the literary construction of the islands as paradise. Kullberg very convincingly shows that the “paradisal imaginary” was the key to a moral narrative that Du Tertre unfolds within a refined paratextual framing of his “progressivist vision of a colonial paradise” (108). However, the picture of a Garden of Eden is disturbed by the presence of slavery, violence, and natural disasters that frequently haunted the islands. Kullberg describes how Du Tertre was very much aware of the ethical implications, particularly caused by war against the Indigenous Amerindians and the enslavement of Africans, and how this contradicted his narrative of justification for French colonialism.

This posed the main problem for the missionary. In the third part of her book, Kullberg argues that he attempted to resolve this problem by a peculiar dramatization of the process of colonization. Central to this drama is the body of the colonizer and the colonized. Kullberg interprets Du Tertre's use of the body as a rhetorical resource to bridge the gap between the known and unknown in his representation of the Antilles (133). The corporeal metaphor culminates in his description of cannibalism not only among the Amerindians, but also Frenchmen, to portray the alterity and savagery of the New World. But the suffering body of the African slave, the beaten Caribbean warrior in battle, or the afflicted and famished indentured servant also evoke the Christian image of a community held together by the common band of misery, emphatically expressed by the pathos in Du Tertre's epic (174). The compassionate reader of the Histoire, in Kullberg's final argument, is thus drawn into this narrative of a “family drama” in which each of its members are part of one common colonial body (185).

Kullberg's reading of Du Tertre is fascinating and eye-opening even to those who have read the Histoire générale des Antilles before. Her reinterpretation of the exotic imaginary as a rhetorical tool to justify the colonial process that leads to a cultural relativism reminiscent of romantic estheticism and postcolonial theory is very compelling. This highly recommendable book encourages the reader to reevaluate not only Du Tertre as an important contributor to colonial discourse in the seventeenth century, but also exoticism as a concept beyond its binary function within an ignorant ethnocentrism.