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Headless Horror: Writing Decapitation in the French Caribbean Plantationocene

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 April 2025

Maeve McCusker Open the ORCID record for Maeve McCusker [Opens in a new window]
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Abstract

Decapitation has captivated artists and writers since antiquity and has been generously theorized, notably in a European framework. As a less analyzed trope of plantation fiction, decapitation conjures both the torture and the revenge of the enslaved. The French Caribbean literary tradition, emerging in the shadow of the French and the Haitian revolutions, is especially haunted by the severed head. Beyond the revolutionary context, decapitation represents crisis—a threat to the plantationocene. Victor Séjour's “Le mulâtre” (1837), Henri Micaux's De nègres et de békés (2011), and Raphaël Confiant's Bal masqué à Békéland (2013)—published more than 175 years after Séjour's short story—cohere in the castrative associations of (white paternal) decapitation. Maryse Condé's Célanire cou-coupé (2000), in contrast, stages a picaresque parody of this Freudian paradigm; this story of recapitation and female survival is fundamentally enabled by the nomadic novel's departure from the plantation and the overdetermined associations imposed by that chronotope.

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Essay
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PMLA , Volume 140 , Issue 1 , January 2025 , pp. 88 - 103
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Copyright © 2025 The Author(s). Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Modern Language Association of America

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