Monsters and Revolutionaries: Colonial Family Romance and Metissage

The author analyzes the complex relationship between the coloniser and colonized on the Indian Ocean island of Reunion. Through novels, iconography, and texts from various disciplines including law, medicine and psychology, she constructs a political and cultural history of the island’s relations with France. The text argues that the central dynamic in the colonial family romance is that of debt and dependence. Following a 17th-century French colonial decree, Reunion abolished slavery in 1848, and Verges explains how the republican ideals of the French Revolution and the Enlightenment are seen as gifts that can never be repaid. This dynamic is complicated by the presence of Metissage, a source of anxiety to the colonizer in its refutation of the purity of racial bloodlines. Woven throughout is Verges’s own family history, which is intimately tied to the history of Reunion itself.