La testimonianza di Édouard Corbière nei processi di trasformazione della modernità

Abstract

Édouard Corbière’s Le Négrier (1832) is a great maritime novel that explores oceanic routes and colonial spaces (Martinique, Gabon) in a clear anthropological perspective. The author, who was a captain of pirate ships during the slave trade period from Africa to the West Indies, creates a polyphonic and choral language in which the technical registers of the specialized naval lexicon coexist with the descriptive prose of a geographer and a traveler capable of reporting the peculiarities of the landscape, and the life in the colonies. The narrative acquires the value of a witness: Captain Corbière’s “tristes tropiques” constitute a fictional “elsewhere” that becomes symbolic of the European and French consciousness and its contradictions.