Eloquence Embodied: Nonverbal Communication among French and Indigenous Peoples in the Americas by Céline Carayon (review)

Reviewed by: Eloquence Embodied: Nonverbal Communication among French and Indigenous Peoples in the Americas by Céline Carayon Christian Ayne Crouch Eloquence Embodied: Nonverbal Communication among French and Indigenous Peoples in the Americas. By Céline Carayon. Williamsburg, Va., and Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. 472 pages. Cloth, ebook, pdf. In this fresh reading of French Atlantic encounters from the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, Céline Carayon takes on both the world of nonverbal communications and the possibilities of exchange experienced by Indigenous peoples in the Western Hemisphere, myriad French voyagers, and aspiring settler colonists. The premise of Eloquence Embodied is that communication could be "satisfactory … without (or with minimal) recourse to words" (7) and that, in fact, communication could be improved through physicality, through a world of kinetic gestures, expressions, and carefully orchestrated signs. Recovering the "eloquence embodied" of her title allows Carayon to argue against narratives that have, to her mind, misunderstood and reduced to cultural clash "the multidimensionality of colonial communication events" (8). This book sets out to correct both by attending carefully to extant sources. Portraying the French as "sensitive observers" (12), she takes their records seriously to read for the oral and gestural beyond the verbal. Significantly, and to the credit of her study, she does not suggest that the interactions between Indigenous peoples and settler colonists transpired without conflict. Rather, she demonstrates that attending to the nonverbal allows new insights into evolving French concepts about indigeneity and empire. Going further, she argues that exploring the nature of nonverbal communication will also assist in the recovery of Native epistemologies, alternative literacies, and established cultural practices. These in turn not only provide insights into the successes and failures of French colonial enterprises but also demonstrate how Indigenous peoples manifested and expressed their sovereignty and power. Carayon's work fits nicely into fields that have grown rapidly over the past decades. They encompass monographs that consider the visual and affective world of the early Atlantic, work on performance and disability studies, and the rise of a more textured French Atlantic historiographical tradition.1 Recovering a rich world of signs and gestures appearing in [End Page 440] many ethnographic narratives—but going undiscussed in previous scholarship—Carayon moves beyond a simple history of signs and sign language and into the complements, complications, and tensions between verbal expression and signs and gestures. Her area of study is firmly situated in a French Atlantic world, a decision that lends the book richness and precision because she takes a comparative approach, examining French experiences and sources from across the Western Hemisphere. Scholarship on the French Atlantic tends toward focused studies of particular colonies, such as New France or Kourou (in modern-day French Guiana), studies of regions such as the French Antilles, or focused perspectives on narrow bands of Atlantic exchange between the metropole and a particular colonial destination.2 By integrating encounter narratives from Brazil, Florida, and Canada, Eloquence Embodied offers a refreshing new lens and will hopefully encourage more intracolonial comparative scholarship. If the book engages with scholarship on performance, emotion, disability, and the French Atlantic, it centers on careful readings of Indigenous intentions, actions, and communication as more than simply acts of resistance or reactions to European encounters. Carayon takes pains to provide depth, nuance, and specificity as she explores Indigenous experiences and showcases the ways Indigenous peoples gestured—and thought they gestured—to a shared world of meaning and interpretation central to Indigenous traditions into which Europeans could be incorporated. Divided into three sections, Eloquence Embodied covers, first, the place and practice of nonverbal communication in an Atlantic context. Next, it turns to the transformation of communication strategies and interpretation from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century and, finally, it analyzes the impact of both shared and mistaken nonverbal communications on Indigenous and French experiences in a mutually constituted colonial world. Carayon brings her readers into a world replete with visuality, movement, and sound, illuminating facets of the experiences of Indigenous and French individuals in each chapter and weaving together textual fragments from a range of written and visual sources depicting nonverbal...

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