Jacqueline Couti’s new book, “Sex, Sea, and Self,” continues her research examining the construction of self and identity through what she terms “dangerous Creole liaisons” — the problematic interconnections between sexuality and nationalism within the French Caribbean and Black Atlantic.
Couti, the Laurence H. Favrot Professor in the Department of Modern and Classical Literatures and Cultures, has spent her career studying the trans-Atlantic and transnational connections between cultural productions from continental France and its former colonies such as Martinique and Guadeloupe.
“We have long sexualized the sea and the people who live next to the sea,” she said. Just listen, she said, to any Serge Gainsbourg song for notably French examples. “Tu es la vague, moi l’île nue” (“You are the wave, me the naked island”) sings Gainsbourg in his most famous composition, “Je t’aime moi non plus.”