‘Peculiar, Exotic, Irresistible’: Exotic Decay and the Fantasy of Enslaved Beauty in Lafcadio Hearn’s Two Years in the French West Indies (1890)

Abstract

What role do racialized women play in the articulation of decadent aesthetics in the colonial Caribbean? This article takes up that question by turning to Lafcadio Hearn’s Two Years in the French West Indies (1890), a text that registers both fascination and ambivalence toward Creole culture in the wake of emancipation. Hearn is best known as a cosmopolitan figure whose work traverses the US South, the Caribbean, and Japan. Yet while much of the critical attention on Hearn has focused on his global mobility, folkloric ethnography, and Japonisme, his writing in and about the French West Indies has received less sustained analysis. In particular, scholars have yet to fully reckon with the aesthetic and ideological weight he places on the figure of the femme de couleur – a mixed-race woman whose beauty, agency, and racial proximity to whiteness make her a potent figure of both desire and decline.