This open-access book investigates Francophone Caribbean literature by exploring and analyzing
French seventeenth-century travel writings. The book argues for a literary re-examination of
the representation of the early colonial Caribbean by proposing theoretical linkages to
contemporary Caribbean theories of creolization and archipelagic thinking. Using Édouard
Glissant's notion of points of entanglement Christina Kullberg claims that the historical
social and political messiness of the Caribbean seventeenth century make for complex
representations and expressions generating textual instability despite the travelers' apparent
desires to domesticate the islands. Taking a synoptic approach to travel narratives in French
from 1620 up to the publication of Labat's Nouveau voyage aux Isles de l'Amérique in 1722
Kullberg examines textual instances where the islands and the peoples of this period disrupt
and unsettle dominant French narratives and enter productively into the construction of
knowledge and the representations of the region. Kullberg's contribution is to read French
early modern travels in situ as shaped by the archipelagic geography its history and social
formations in order to interrogate both the construction and the limitations of discourses of
power.
