Monsters and Revolutionaries

In Monsters and Revolutionaries Franoise Vergs analyzes the complex relationship between the colonizer and colonized on the Indian Ocean island of Runion. Through novels, iconography, and texts from various disciplines including law, medicine, and psychology, Vergs constructs a political and cultural history of the islands relations with France. Woven throughout is Vergss own family history, which is intimately tied to the history of Runion itself. Originally settled by sugar plantation owners and their Indian and African slaves following a seventeenth-century French colonial decree, Runion abolished slavery in 1848. Because plantation owners continued to import workers from India, Africa, Asia, and Madagascar, the island was defined as a place based on mixed heritages, or mtissage. Vergs reads the relationship between France and the residents of Runion as a family romance: France is the seemingly protective mother, La Mre-Patrie, while the people of Runion are seen and see themselves as Frances children. Arguing that the central dynamic in the colonial family romance is that of debt and dependence, Verges explains how the republican ideals of the French Revolution and the Enlightenment are seen as gifts to Runion that can never be repaid. This dynamic is complicated by the presence of mtissage, a source of anxiety to the colonizer in its refutation of the purity of racial bloodlines. For Vergs, the islands history of slavery is the key to understanding mtissage, the politics of assimilation, constructions of masculinity, and emancipatory discourses on Runion.