The body is never neutral. In the French Antilles, it is less neutral than almost anywhere else. For three centuries, the Afro-descendant body has been named, classified, disciplined, hypersexualized, controlled — then reclaimed, celebrated, reinvented. It is the site where colonial history has left its most enduring marks, and the one where the postcolonial societies of Martinique and Guadeloupe continue to negotiate their relationship to themselves.
This article offers a synthesis of the academic work produced since the 1980s on this question, drawing on history, anthropology, sociology, the arts, and philosophy. The goal is not exhaustiveness. It is to show that the Afro-Caribbean body functions as a palimpsest: the history of bondage and resistance can still be read in it, faintly, even as it keeps being rewritten under the pressure of contemporary struggles for equality, beauty, and freedom.
A body classified, ranked, controlled
French colonization of the Antilles produced, from the 17th century onward, a system for classifying bodies based on physical criteria: skin pigmentation, hair type, facial features. This was not simply an aesthetic matter. It was an architecture of power. As anthropologist Jean-Luc Bonniol puts it, colonial ideology placed Blackness on one side — synonymous with servility, inferiority, negativity — and whiteness on the other — freedom, superiority, positivity. This logic survived the abolition of slavery in 1848. It continued to structure the imaginaries and social practices of the Antilles long after departmentalization in 1946, and Bonniol noted as recently as 2015 that individuals' social status often remains correlated with phenotypic criteria in the Antillean collective imagination.
Far from dismantling this order, the republican school long reinforced it. Historian Clara Palmiste, analyzing speeches given at prize ceremonies in Guadeloupe and Martinique between 1905 and 1920, shows that colonial public education carried a project of bodily domestication aligned with European bourgeois values. Creole girls were taught a morality of modesty and restraint, built on the implicit ideal of the white bourgeois woman. Kinky hair, and attributes judged too "African" or too "sensual," had to be contained, erased. What Palmiste reads through the Foucauldian notion of biopower is a domination of female bodies carried out by the school institution itself, locking girls into subaltern roles and instilling in them the idea of their own inferiority.
The question of hair illustrates these mechanisms of internalization with striking precision. As early as 1842, Victor Schœlcher observed that women of color inflicted "horrible tortures" on themselves to discipline their kinky hair and pass it off as straight. In Creole vocabulary, the opposition between "beaux cheveux" (smooth, wavy, closer to the Caucasian type) and "chivé rèd" (kinky hair, perceived as unruly) was far from trivial. It expressed an aesthetic hierarchy inherited directly from the slave regime, in which phenotypic closeness to whiteness constituted a concrete social advantage. Today's nappy movement, which encourages Black women to wear their hair natural, is not a fashion trend. It is a political break with decades of self-denial.
The female body: between doudouism and reclamation
The Antillean woman's body has occupied a particular place in the colonial imagination. Doubly oppressed — exploited as slave labor and turned into a sexual object by the white colonizer — she was frozen into the stereotype of the "doudou": a figure of supposedly ardent, naïve, available sexuality, fantasized by the European male gaze. Martinican scholar Jacqueline Couti uses the term "doudouism" to describe this tendency to exoticize and eroticize Antillean women in the French imagination. This stereotype did not stay confined to colonial literature. Couti shows that many male Antillean writers of the 20th century, even as they rejected white domination, reproduced in their own texts an exaggerated sexualization of female bodies, sometimes used instrumentally to assert virility or cultural nationalism. The colonial rupture was not always enough to break this gaze.
It was women writers' voices that initiated this break. Starting in the 1980s, Antillean women novelists and poets placed the Black female body at the center of their narratives — no longer as a silent fantasy, but as the subject of its own history. Gisèle Pineau explores in her novels the violence suffered by Antillean women and its psychosomatic consequences. In L'Espérance-macadam (1995), she addresses head-on the realities of prostitution and sex tourism in Guadeloupe. Maryse Condé, in Histoire de la femme cannibale (2003), deals with female sexuality and the aging body, subjects long kept invisible. Literary critic Françoise Naudillon points out that Francophone literature had long treated the Black woman's body as an unexplored "dark continent." These works, by contrast, make it the starting point for a discourse on collective history, slavery, migration, postcolonial identity.
The alienation of the Antillean female body also has an institutional dimension that socio-historical research has gradually brought to light. In the 1960s–1970s, the French state implemented birth-control policies in the Antilles that were at times abusive, including sterilization and forced contraception campaigns denounced notably in Guadeloupe. Behind these practices lies the same neocolonial logic that, under cover of medical modernization, denied Antillean women the right to control their own bodies.
Carnival and theater: the body as a language of resistance
Antillean carnival is arguably the most politically charged bodily performance there is. Inherited from both European masquerades and the African rites of enslaved people, it is a time when norms are overturned, when identities come apart and reassemble. In Martinique and Guadeloupe, several traditional carnival figures directly stage the memory of slavery.
The Nèg Gwo Siwo, a man covered head to toe in black molasses, is not a picturesque character. He evokes the maroons, those escaped enslaved people whose bodies, coated in soot or molasses, symbolized their break with colonial order. During carnival, the Nèg Gwo Siwo run through the streets, smearing spectators as they embrace them, abolishing social distance. Their soiled bodies evoke both the suffering of the enslaved and the wild freedom of the elusive maroon. Ethnologist Blodwenn Mauffret reads in this practice an "eroticism of soiling": by covering themselves in matter, carnival-goers enact a collective fusion that symbolically abolishes the social order colonization put in place. It is a bodily micro-utopia — fleeting, and real.
In theater, scholar Sylvie Chalaye has developed the notion of the "corps marron" ("maroon body") to describe the stage aesthetics of contemporary Black playwrights and choreographers. In Corps marron (2018), she analyzes how writers such as Guadeloupean Gerty Dambury or Martinican Alfred Alexandre refuse the frameworks inherited from colonization to invent liberated theatrical forms. The performer's body becomes a polymorphous material there: at once an archive-body carrying the pains of the past, and a future-body able to free itself from them through hybridization and creativity. On stages across Martinique and Guadeloupe, works blending Afro-spiritual rites, contemporary dance, and spoken word explore corporealities the Western gaze had never deigned to consider. Martinican choreographer Annabel Guérédrat works explicitly on the decolonized body, weaving healing rituals and ancestral references into her performances to reconnect the present body to forces that history had severed.
Literature, too, has reinvested the flesh. Patrick Chamoiseau, in Texaco (1992), paints scenes where the bodies of ordinary people — masons, washerwomen, street musicians — carry the island's memory within them and become living archives of creolization. Édouard Glissant, in Le Discours antillais (1981), argued for the necessity of reinvesting the materiality of Antillean culture against the traps of an abstract universal. These texts helped restore a bodily, fleshly presence to Black subjects whom colonial literature had reduced to mere silhouettes.
The body in contemporary political space
The politicization of the Afro-descendant body does not stop at the stage or the page. It runs through contemporary Antillean society from end to end.
In 2009, during the large general strikes against the high cost of living in Guadeloupe and Martinique, the racial dimension of the conflict expressed itself notably through resentment toward the béké minority — descendants of white colonists who control most of the local economy. When Alain Huyghues-Despointes publicly claimed to have "preserved the purity of his race," the outrage it sparked revealed that the white body and the Black body still carried the weight of power relations in the Antillean collective unconscious. This was not a minor controversy. It laid bare a structural racism that departmentalization had never dissolved.
In 2020, statues of Joséphine de Beauharnais were beheaded by activists in Martinique. A performative act as much as a political one: symbolically punishing a white colonial body to restore dignity to the Black bodies of its victims. That same year, the Black Lives Matter movement found echoes in the Antilles, where crowds marched carrying images of George Floyd and Adama Traoré. The Antillean community recognized itself in a global history of the oppressed Black body, and politicized its own body in public space.
The question of poisoned bodies imposed itself with the same force. The chlordecone scandal — a carcinogenic pesticide massively used in Guadeloupean and Martinican banana plantations until 1993 — made the metaphor of the colonized body literal: bodies poisoned by a substance imposed by the béké agro-industry, still present in the soil, in the water, in the flesh of the islands' inhabitants. The fight by victims and collectives for recognition of this public health crime is also a fight for bodily sovereignty.
These dynamics converge toward a single finding, one that postcolonial studies of the 2000s–2020s have theorized with precision: the non-white body was constructed as "Other" by colonization — a wild body, hypersexualized, potentially dangerous — and this construction persists in very present-day media and police representations. The essays collected in the issue Politique du corps (post)colonial of the journal Asylon(s) (no. 15, 2018), edited by Malcom Ferdinand and Pauline Vermeren, draw on Foucault, Fanon, and Mbembe to articulate what theory owes to Antillean bodies: not exotic objects of study, but subjects whose historical experience interrogates the very foundations of modernity.
The Afro-descendant body in the French Antilles is not just another object of study. It is a place where four centuries of history are condensed: the history of what was done to it, and the history of what it resisted, invented, and passed on. Academic research since the 1980s has gradually restored this complexity, showing how coloniality persists in bodily representations and practices, while also documenting the dynamics of identity reinvention at work in postcolonial Antillean societies.
This body, to borrow Suzanne Césaire's phrase, seeks to "déchouquer" — to uproot — old colonial habits from within itself. This is not some distant horizon. It is daily, committed, living work.
Sources
Bonniol, Jean-Luc. 2020. "Race, couleur et métissage dans les sociétés antillaises de colonisation française." Patrimoines Partagés, BnF.
Chalaye, Sylvie. 2018. Corps marron: Les poétiques de marronnage des dramaturgies afro-contemporaines. Éditions Passage(s).
Couti, Jacqueline. 2021. Sex, Sea, and Self: Sexuality and Nationalism in French Caribbean Discourses, 1924–1948. Liverpool University Press.
Gordien, Ary. 2019. "La coupe afro: une simple histoire de cheveux ?" La Vie des Idées.
Naudillon, Françoise. 2005. "Le continent noir des corps." Études françaises 41(2).
Palmiste, Clara. 2022. "Façonner les rôles sexués et discipliner le corps féminin." Amnis 4.
Pavy, Flore. 2021. Voukoum. Esprits rebelles du carnaval en Guadeloupe. Publications de la Sorbonne.
Vermeren, Pauline & Ferdinand, Malcom (dir.). 2018. "Politique du corps (post)colonial." Asylon(s) no. 15.
© Noor-Sharina Grondin, 2025. This text is protected by copyright. Any reproduction or use without authorization is prohibited. For any request, contact: norahdoctorante@gmail.com