Imagining Colonial Motherhood: Métissage, Mother Nation, and Marian(ne): Apparitions in Houat’s Les Marrons (1844)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: “Imagining Colonial Motherhood: Métissage, Mother Nation, and Marian Apparitions in Houat’s Les Marrons (1844),” examines two tableaux from Les Marrons , an abolitionist novel written by Réunion Island native Louis-Timagène Houat in 1844. Les Marrons marked a turning point in Réunion’s history: it was the first novel to be authored by a native, and the first written utterance of Reunionese political consciousness and imagination. The novel was conceived as an anti-slavery pamphlet, fueled by Republican ideals of social and racial reconciliation. It stages a colonial romance between a white woman and an African slave in Réunion, then a French colony, culminating in the birth of a métis child. Through a close analysis of two tableaux from Les Marrons, this paper investigates the ideal of motherhood that emerges in the French colonial imagination. Marie, the novel’s only feminine figure is imagined as a white mother, in an apparent denial of the Black mothers of the island’s origins. The white mother is likened to the island itself, as both island and woman are perceived as porous liminal grounds—sites of potential racial pollution. Houat’s novel offers a prime perspective onto the ambivalence that characterized the colonial apprehension of the white woman, through its iconic evocation of the Virgin Mary and the Mother Nation. This paper also suggests that the figure of the white mother, identified as a significant point of convergence of metropolitan and Reunionese antislavery discourses, helped tie a symbolic knot between France and its insular colony, and produced France as the motherland.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".