International Journal of Language & Linguistics

Zombies, Slatterns, Rakes and Ne’er-do-wells: Representations of the Creole in the French XVIII Century
Antoinette SOL

Abstract
Post-colonial studies for the past thirty years have explored representations of the other: the other as slave, as marginalized, as native and as the colonized other. This study turns attention to the fictional representations of the colonizer. The different representationsof the Creole have one thing in common, they draw in one way or another on tropes established in Le Zombi du grand Pérou (1697) by Paul-Alexis Blesse bois. Period texts, unconsciously or deliberately, demonstrate how ideologies of conquest, of domination et of exploitation color not only description and portraits of different “races” and ethnicities, but also buttress politics of colonialism. This study examines representations of the colonizers and of the creole from well-established colonial families, to the newly arrived, French from France and French colonial born. The creole, tainted by proximity to the enslaved, figured in colonial myths circulating, directly and indirectly, in French novels in the XVIII century.

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