Download or read book Of Suffocated Hearts and Tortured Souls written by Valérie Orlando and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2003 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A striking number of hysterical or insane female characters populate Francophone women's writing. To discover why, Orlando reads novels from a variety of cultures, teasing out key elements of Francophone identity struggles.

Download or read book Of Suffocated Hearts and Tortured Souls written by Valérie Orlando and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Race Gender and Comparative Black Modernism written by Jennifer M. Wilks and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Race, Gender, and Comparative Black Modernism revives and critiques four African American and Francophone Caribbean women writers sometimes overlooked in discussions of early-twentieth-century literature: Guadeloupean Suzanne Lacascade (dates unknown), African American Marita Bonner (1899--1971), Martinican Suzanne Cesaire (1913--1966), and African American Dorothy West (1907--1998). Reexamining their most significant work, Jennifer M. Wilks demonstrates how their writing challenges prevailing racial archetypes -- such as the New Negro and the Negritude hero -- of the period from the 1920s to the 1940s, and explores how these writers tapped into modernist currents from expressionism to surrealism to produce progressive treatments of race, gender, and nation that differed from those of currently canonized black writers of the era, the great majority of whom are men. Wilks begins with Lacascade, whom she deems "best known for being unknown," reading Lacascade's novel Claire-Solange, ame africaine (1924) as a protofeminist, proto-Negritude articulation of Caribbean identity. She then examines the fissures left unexplored in New Negro visions of African American community by showing the ways in which Bonner's essays, plays, and short stories highlight issues of economic class. Cesaire applied the ideas and techniques of surrealism to the French language, and Wilks reveals how her writings in the journal Tropiques (1941-45) directly and insightfully engage the intellectual influences that informed the work of canonical Negritude. Wilks' close reading of West's The Living Is Easy (1948) provides a retrospective critique of the forces that continued to circumscribe women's lives in the midst of the social and cultural awakening presumably embodied in the New Negro. To show how the black literary tradition has continued to confront the conflation of gender roles with social and literary conventions, Wilks examines these writers alongside the late twentieth-century writings of Maryse Conde and Toni Morrison. Unlike many literary analysts, Wilks does not bring together the four writers based on geography. Lacascade and Cesaire came from different Caribbean islands, and though Bonner and West were from the United States, they never crossed paths. In considering this eclectic group of women writers together, Wilks reveals the analytical possibilities opened up by comparing works influenced by multiple intellectual traditions. "

Download or read book Women Fight Women Write written by Mildred Mortimer and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2018-11-29 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today, the "fight to write"—the struggle to become the legitimate chronicler of one’s own story—is being waged and won by women across mediums and borders. But such battles of authorship extend well beyond a single cultural moment. In her gripping study of unsung female narratives of the Algerian War, Mildred Mortimer excavates and explores the role of women’s individual and collective memory in recording events of the violent anticolonial conflict. Presenting close readings of published works spanning five decades—from Assia Djebar’s 1962 Children of the New World to Zohra Drif’s 2014 Inside the Battle of Algiers: Memoir of a Woman Freedom Fighter— Women Fight, Women Write traces stylistic and material transformations in Algerian women’s writings as it reveals evolving attitudes toward memory, trauma, historical objectivity, and women’s political empowerment. Refuting the stale binary of men in battle, women at home, these testimonial texts let women lay claim to the Algerian War story as participants and also as chroniclers through fiction, historical studies, and memoir. Algeria’s patriarchal norms long kept women from speaking publicly about private matters, silencing their experiences of the war. Still, the conflict has ceaselessly sparked creative work. The country’s dark decade of violent struggle between the Algerian army and Islamist fundamentalists in the 1990s brought the liberation struggle back into focus, inspiring and emboldening many more women to defiantly write. Women Fight, Women Write advances the broken silence, illuminating its vital historical revisions and literary innovations.

Download or read book Writing through the Visual and Virtual written by Renée Larrier and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2015-11-12 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writing Through the Visual and Virtual: Inscribing Language, Literature, and Culture in Francophone Africa and the Caribbean interrogates conventional notions of writing. The contributors—whose disciplines include anthropology, art history, education, film, history, linguistics, literature, performance studies, philosophy, sociology, translation, and visual arts—examine the complex interplay between language/literature/arts and the visual and virtual domains of expressive culture. The twenty-five essays explore various patterns of writing practices arising from contemporary and historical forces that have impacted the literatures and cultures of Benin, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, Guadeloupe, Haiti, Martinique, Morocco, Niger, Reunion Island, and Senegal. Special attention is paid to how scripts, though appearing to be merely decorative in function, are often used by artists and performers in the production of material and non-material culture to tell “stories” of great significance, co-mingling words and images in a way that leads to a creative synthesis that links the local and the global, the “classical” and the “popular” in new ways

Download or read book From Menstruation to the Menopause written by Maria Kathryn Tomlinson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the representation of the female fertility cycle in contemporary Algerian, Mauritian, and French women's writing. It focuses on menstruation, childbirth, and the menopause whilst also incorporating experiences such as miscarriage and abortion. This study frames its analysis of contemporary women's writing by looking back to the pioneering work of the second-wave feminists. Second-wave feminist texts were the first to break the silence on key aspects of female experience which had thus far been largely overlooked or considered taboo. Second-wave feminist works have been criticised for applying their 'universal' theories to all women, regardless of their ethnicity, socio-economic status, or sexuality. This book argues that contemporary women's writing has continued the challenge against normative perceptions of the body that was originally launched by the second-wave feminists, whilst also taking a more nuanced, contextual and intersectional approach to corporeal experience. The cross-cultural and interdisciplinary approach of this book is informed not only by critics of the second-wave feminist movement but also by sociological studies which consider how women's bodily experiences are shaped by socio-cultural context.

Download or read book Migrant Revolutions written by Valerie Kaussen and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2008 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Migrant Revolutions: Haitian Literature, Globalization, and U.S. Imperialism interprets Haitian literature in a transnational context of anti-colonial--and anti-globalization--politics. Positing a materialist and historicized account of Haitian literary modernity, it traces the themes of slavery, labor migration, diaspora, and revolution in works by Jacques Roumain, Marie Chauvet, Edwidge Danticat, and others. Author Valerie Kaussen argues that the sociocultural effects of U.S. imperialism have renewed and expanded the relevance of the universal political ideals that informed Haiti's eighteenth-century slave revolt and war of decolonization. Finally, Migrant Revolutions defines Haitian literary modernity as located at the forefront of the struggles against transnational empire and global colonialism.

Download or read book The World as a Global Agora written by Soumia Boutkhil and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009-03-26 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the current postmodern reality where society is no longer viewed as a totality but as a collection of individual interests, public space both as a physical and symbolic space, has no determined contours and the public sphere is likely to take new forms. Yet as a crucial principle of democracy, public space will continue to feed discussions as long as models of participatory democracy represent the guarantor of good governance and the preservation of the public good. Ranging from architecture, sociology, to literary criticism and women and gender studies, the essays that compose this collection have as a common denominator the idea of public space as a vital aspect of public life in modern as well as in developing and traditional societies. Placing themselves beyond the relentless theoretical debates around the concept of public space, the authors agree that no matter what forms it takes, public space remains a fundamental aspect of even those societies that until recently were viewed as hermetically sealed. What emerges from the different perspectives included in this book is a general consensus that the symbolic value of the physical public space is grounded in the collective socio-political consciousness as the basis for a general sense of civic action.

Download or read book Confining Spaces Resistant Subjectivities written by Kinana Hamam and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-08-11 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book represents a significant contribution to academic knowledge, making a compelling case for a contemporary analytical re-reading of a number of “core” postcolonial women’s narratives, such as Erna Brodber’s Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home, Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood, and Mariama Bâ’s So Long a Letter. These narratives highlight diversity, contextuality, opposition, and metachrony, have a “generative literary function”, and anticipate what have now become postcolonial feminist issues and debates. Bringing together feminist writing from a range of postcolonial contexts, the book contributes to a field represented by the critical writings of Francoise Lionnet, Ketu Katrak, and Elleke Boehmer, among others. The deconstructive, cultural approach of the book is mobilised to support an in-depth literary analysis which focuses on female oppression, difference, voice, and agency. Questions of what it means to be “a woman” and to be “postcolonial” are read as central debates which emphasise “multi-vocal and multi-focal” female narratives and perspectives. That is, they highlight the temporal, as well as cross-cultural links and implications of the selected narratives, which give the project a kind of positive complexity and linkage. Above all, the analysis of several unconventional modes and (physical/imaginative) spaces of female resistance, such as prison, widow confinement, and madness, yields some surprising results that are sustained by a close reading of the texts which are not only attentive to questions of genre, structure, imagery and narrative endings, but also oppositional, instructive and reconstructive.

Download or read book Disturbers of the Peace written by Kelly Baker Josephs and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2013-10-11 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring the prevalence of madness in Caribbean texts written in English in the mid-twentieth century, Kelly Baker Josephs focuses on celebrated writers such as Jean Rhys, V. S. Naipaul, and Derek Walcott as well as on understudied writers such as Sylvia Wynter and Erna Brodber. Because mad figures appear frequently in Caribbean literature from French, Spanish, and English traditions—in roles ranging from bit parts to first-person narrators—the author regards madness as a part of the West Indian literary aesthetic. The relatively condensed decolonization of the anglophone islands during the 1960s and 1970s, she argues, makes literature written in English during this time especially rich for an examination of the function of madness in literary critiques of colonialism and in the Caribbean project of nation-making. In drawing connections between madness and literature, gender, and religion, this book speaks not only to the field of Caribbean studies but also to colonial and postcolonial literature in general. The volume closes with a study of twenty-first-century literature of the Caribbean diaspora, demonstrating that Caribbean writers still turn to representations of madness to depict their changing worlds.

Download or read book The Production of the Muslim Woman written by Lamia Ben Youssef Zayzafoon and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2005 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author investigates the configurations of power implicated in the production of the discourses on the 'muslim woman' in the West and North Africa. She argues that as a single category, the 'muslim woman' is an 'invention', whether in the Western discourses of Orientalism (Isabelle Eberhardt) and psychoanalytic feminism (De Beauvoir, Irigaray, Cixous and Lacan), or in the discourses of islamic feminism (Djebar and Mernissi) and Maghrebian nationalism (Habib Bourguiba and Tahar al Haddad).

Download or read book Decadent Orientalisms written by David Fieni and published by Fordham University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-07 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Decadent Orientalisms presents a sustained critique of the ways Orientalism and decadence have formed a joint discursive mode of the imperial imagination. Attentive to historical and literary configurations of language, race, religion, and power, Fieni shows the importance of understanding Western discourses of Eastern decline and obsolescence together with Arab and Islamic responses in which the language of decadence returns as a characteristic of the West. Taking seriously Edward Said’s claim that Orientalism is a “style of having power,” Fieni works historically through the aesthetic and ideological effects of Orientalist style, showing how it is at once comparative, descriptive, and performative. Orientalism, the book argues, relies upon decadence as the figure through which its positivist scientific claims become redistributed as speech acts—“truths” that establish dominance. Rather than attending to Orientalism as a repertoire of clichés and stereotypes, Decadent Orientalisms considers the systemic epistemological consequences of the diffuse, yet coherent network of institutions that have constituted Orientalism’s power.

Download or read book Sex Sea and Self written by Jacqueline Couti and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sex, Sea, and Self reassesses the place of the French Antilles and French Caribbean literature within current postcolonial thought and visions of the Black Atlantic. Using a feminist lens, this study examines neglected twentieth-century French texts by Black writers from Martinique and Guadeloupe, making the analysis of some of these texts available to readers of English for the first time. This interdisciplinary study of female and male authors reconsiders their political strategies and the critical role of French creoles in the creation of their own history. This approach recalibrates overly simplistic understandings of the victimization and alienation of French Caribbean people. In the systems of cultural production under consideration, sexuality constitutes an instrument of political and cultural consciousness in the chaotic period between 1924 and 1948. Studying sexual imagery constructed around female bodies demonstrates the significance of agency and the legacy of the past in cultural resistance and political awareness. Sex, Sea, and Self particularly highlights Antillean women intellectuals' theoretical contributions to Caribbean critical theory. Therefore, this analysis illuminates debates on the multifaceted and conflicted relationships between France and its overseas departments and expands ideas of nationhood in the Black Atlantic and the Americas.

Download or read book Rethinking Marriage in Francophone African and Caribbean Literatures written by Cecile Accilien and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2008-02-08 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rethinking Marriage in Francophone African and Caribbean Literatures analyzes novels and films that demonstrate how marriage affects Francophone African and Caribbean women in their respective societies. It argues that marriage serves as a catalyst for intense identity formation because it functions as a narrative intersection for a number of overlapping themes on gender and the body, class and economics, religion, interracial and intercultural identity and nation building. Marriage provides a narrative space for commentary on cultural practices presented in the works in question as the foundations of cultural identity.

Download or read book Rethinking Marriage in Francophone African and Carribean Literatures written by Cécile Accilien and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2008 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rethinking Marriage in Francophone African and Caribbean Literatures analyzes novels and films that demonstrate how marriage affects Francophone African and Caribbean women in their respective societies. It argues that marriage serves as a catalyst for intense identity formation because it functions as a narrative intersection for a number of overlapping themes on gender and the body, class and economics, religion, interracial and intercultural identity and nation building. Marriage provides a narrative space for commentary on cultural practices presented in the works in question as the foundations of cultural identity.

Download or read book Rewriting the Return to Africa written by Anne M. François and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2011-08-16 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rewriting The Return to Africa: Voices of Francophone Caribbean Women Writers examines the ways Guadeloupean women writers Maryse Condé, Simone Schwarz-Bart and Myriam Warner-Vieyra demystify the theme of the return to Africa as opposed to the masculinist version by Négritude male writers from the 1930s to 1960s. Négritude, a cultural and literary movement, drew much of its strength from the idea of a mythical or cultural reconnection with the African past allegorized as a mother figure. In contrast these women writers, of the post-colonial era who are to large extent heirs of Négritude, differ sharply from their male counterparts in their representation of Africa. In their novels, the continent is not represented as a propitious mother figure but a disappointing father figure. This study argues that these women writers' subversion of the metaphorical figure of Africa and its transformation is tied to their gender. The women novelists are indeed critical of a female allegorization of the land that is reminiscent of a colonial or nationalist project and a simplistic representation of motherhood that does not reflect the complexities of the Diaspora's relation to origins and identity. Unlike the primary male writers of the Négritude movement, they carefully "gendered" the notion of return by choosing female protagonists who made their way back to the Motherland in search of identity. I argue that writing is a more suitable space for the female subject seeking identity because it allows her to have a voice and become subject rather than object as that was the case with the Négritude writers. The women writers' shattering of the image of Mother Africa and subsequently that of Father Africa highlights the complex relationship between Africa and the Diaspora from a female point of view. It shifts the identity quest of the characters towards the Caribbean, which emerges as the real problematic mother: a multi-faceted, fragmented figure that reflects the constitutive clash that occurred in the archipelago between Europe, Africa, and the Americas where the issues of race, gender, class, culture, ethnicity, history, and language are very complex.

Download or read book Paradoxical Citizenship written by Silvia Nagy-Zekmi and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2008 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a collection of intriguing essays on the work of Edward Said, internationally-recognized scholars pay homage to the late critic by addressing many aspects of his oeuvre, including his breakthrough Orientalism, the role of the intellectual, the Question of Palestine, and finally his dramatic memoir, Out of Place. This volume is a useful contribution for classroom use, as well as recreational reading for those interested in the work of this controversial thinker.