ABSTRACT
Enlightenment prose poems have been off limits to recent scholarship because their neoclassical aesthetic clashes with an established canon of daring eighteenth-century fiction and drama. While seemingly "kitsch" and self-conscious from a post-Roinantic perspective, their poetics embodies the development of a different kind of Enlightenment critique from the one with which people are familiar, a critique carried through the prism of a heavy classical heritage. Parny was Creole by birth, white by race, and French by education. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the noun and adjective Creole designated a white person born on the American continent or in the tropics. Parny, a native of the Bourbon Island, lived there until nine years old,though he returned periodically after settling in France. The Chansons madecasses open at dusk when the chief Ampanini welcomes a white stranger with a simple meal of rice, milk, and ripe fruit served on large banana leaves.
