Download or read book Women Taking Risks in Contemporary Autobiographical Narratives written by Kenneth Reeds and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2013-10-03 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women Taking Risks in Contemporary Autobiographical Narratives explores the nature and effects of risk in self-narrative representations of life events, and is an early step towards confronting the dearth of analysis on this subject. The collection focuses on risk-taking as one of women’s articulations of authorial agency displayed in literary, testimonial, photographic, travel and film documentary forms of autobiographical expression in French. Among many themes, the book fosters discussion on matters of courage, strength, resilience, freedom, self-fulfillment, political engagement, compassion, faith, and the envisioning of unconventional alliances that follow a woman’s stepping out of her comfort zone. The fourteen essays included in this collection discuss works of women authors from North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, France and the Caribbean. They exemplify a variety of self-narratives that blur unified conceptualizations of both identity and national belonging. They address questions about women writers’ attitudes towards risk and their willingness to change the status quo. They also explore the many personal and public forms in which agency manifests through risk-taking engagements; the ways in which women challenge the conventional wisdom about feminine reserve and aversion to danger; the multiplicity of seen and unforeseen consequences of risk taking; the all-too-frequent lack of recognition of female courage; the overcoming of obstacles by taking risks; and, frequently, the amelioration of women’s lives. Addressing both the broader context of the study of risk and the more specific areas of female expression and autobiography in Francophone cultures, this collection is attractive to a diverse audience with the potential to cross disciplines and inform a wide body of research. A number of the essays deal with issues born in postcolonial circumstances. This examination of the elucidation of marginalized voices should prove enlightening to an array of scholars researching specific ethnic, sexual, gender, and general subjects related to identity. In making inroads towards expanding the well-developed area of risk studies into the humanities, this collection makes an important contribution that has the potential to promote a variety of cross-disciplinary research including examinations of the psychology and sociology behind chauvinism, personal expression, and formative experiences.
Download or read book New Voices of Muslim North African Migrants in Europe written by Cristián H. Ricci and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-08-26 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In New Voices of Muslim North-African Migrants in Europe, Cristián H. Ricci captures the experience in writing of a growing number of individuals belonging to migrant communities in Europe. The book follows attempts to transform postcolonial literary studies into a comparative, translingual, and supranational project.
Download or read book Contemporary Fiction in French written by Anna-Louise Milne and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-25 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Demonstrates how contemporary fiction in French has become a polycentric and transnational field of vibrant and varied experimentation.
Download or read book The Unspeakable written by Amy L. Hubbell and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2013-10-03 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Unspeakable: Representations of Trauma in Francophone Literature and Art is situated at the crossroads of language, culture and genre; it contends that suffering transcends time, space and cultural specificity. Even when extreme trauma is silenced, it often still emerges in surprising and painful ways. This volume draws together examples from throughout the Francophone world, including countries such as Algeria, Morocco, Lebanon, Rwanda, Cameroon, Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Haiti, New Caledonia, Quebec and France, and across genres such as autobiography, poetry, theater, film, fiction and visual art to provide a cohesive analysis of the representation of trauma. In addition to the survivors’ expression of trauma, the witnesses and receivers are also taken into account. By gathering studies that explore diverse bodily and psychological traumas through tropes such as repetition, silence and working-through, it tackles ethical responsibility and interrogates how expressive forms evoke a terrible reality through the use of imagination. The aim of this volume is not to question if suffering is representable, but rather to examine to what extent art surpasses its own limitations and goes straight to its essence. The Unspeakable hopes to provide models for the cultural translation of trauma, because, when represented and released from silence and isolation, trauma can give way to the arduous process of healing.
Download or read book Women and Photography in Africa written by Darren Newbury and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-10-26 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection explores women’s multifaceted historical and contemporary involvement in photography in Africa. The book offers new ways of thinking about the history of photography, exploring through case studies the complex and historically specific articulations of gender and photography on the continent, and attending to the challenge and potential of contemporary feminist and postcolonial engagements with the medium. The volume is organised in thematic sections that present the lives and work of historically significant yet overlooked women photographers, as well as the work of acclaimed contemporary African women photographers such as Héla Ammar, Fatoumata Diabaté, Lebohang Kganye and Zanele Muholi. The book offers critical reflections on the politics of gendered knowledge production and the production of racialised and gendered identities and alternative and subaltern subjectivities. Several chapters illuminate how contemporary African women photographers, collectors and curators are engaging with colonial photographic archives to contest stereotypical forms of representation and produce powerful counter-histories. Raising critical questions about race, gender and the history of photography, the collection provides a model for interdisciplinary feminist approaches for scholars and students of art history, visual studies and African history.
Download or read book Transnational Orientalisms in Contemporary Spanish and Latin American Cinema written by Michele C. Dávila Gonçalves and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2016-02-08 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent decades in Spain and Latin America, transnational voices, typically stereotyped, alienated or co-opted in the Western world, have been gaining increasing presence in cultural texts. The transnational representation of the “Oriental” subject, namely Arabs and Jews, Chinese and other ethnic groups that have migrated to Spain and Latin America either voluntarily or forcefully, is now being seen anew in both literature and cinema. This book explores Orientalism beyond literature, in which it has already garnered attention, to examine the new ways of seeing and interpreting both the Middle East and the East in contemporary films, in which many of the immigrants traditionally omitted from the dominant narratives are able to present the trauma, memories and violence of their exile and migration. As such, this volume explores the representation of those single and doubly marginalized groups in contemporary Spanish and Latin American cinema, analysing how films from Spain, Mexico, Chile, Brazil and Argentina portray transnational subjects from a wide spectrum of the “Orient” world, including Maghrebs from North Africa, and Palestinian, Jewish, Chinese, and Korean peoples. Once vulnerable to the dominant culture of their adopted homes, facing ostracism and marginalisation, these groups are now entering into the popular imagination and revised history of their new countries. This volume explores the following questions as starting points for its analysis: Are these manifestations the new orientalist normative, or are there other characterizations? Are new cinematic scopes and understandings being created? The old stereotypical orientalist ways of seeing these vulnerable groups are beginning to change to a more authentic representation, although, in some cases, they may still reside in the subtext of films.
Download or read book Mothers Who Kill written by Charlotte Beyer and published by Demeter Press. This book was released on 2022-01-10 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This compelling and unique collection of critical and creative work assesses for the first time cultural, literary, legal and historical representations and narratives about mothers who kill and filicide. The idea of a mother killing her child to many presents the greatest taboo, and the most disturbing and distressing aspect of maternal experience. In Toni Morrison's 1987 novel Beloved, escaped slave mother Sethe addresses her daughter Beloved whom she murdered out of desperation, in order to avoid her returning to a life of slavery and sexual abuse. Sethe reflects, “I'll explain to her, even though I don't have to. Why I did it. How if I hadn't killed her she would have died and that is something I could not bear to happen to her. When I explain it she'll understand.” This book goes beyond Morrison's widely known literary portrayal, in order to investigate a range of other, less known but no less challenging, examinations of maternal filicide. Have mothers who kill inevitably been portrayed as monsters in cultural representations? Or are there certain contexts that may urge us to reevaluate maternal behavior? And how might we counter the misogynist narratives surrounding maternal filicide which have governed literary and historical accounts and affected legal discourses? This wide-ranging and innovative volume examines the complex issues of infanticide and mothers who kill from a broad, interdisciplinary perspective, in order to counter the misogynist cultural narratives that underpin prevailing stereotypes of mothers. The book includes creative work, essays on crime fiction, literature from across a range of historical periods, multicultural and Global South perspectives, legal and historical accounts, and more. Making an invaluable contribution to motherhood studies and gender criticism, this book offers a rich insight into current and cutting-edge research into this most troubling area of maternal representation.
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 What Forms Can Do written by Patrick Crowley and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-26 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does form propose a bridge between the text and the world beyond? This volume investigates the agency of form across a spectrum of twentieth- and twenty-first century French and Francophone writings, renewing the engagement with form that has been a key feature of French cultural production and of analysis in French studies.
Download or read book Contemporary Feminist Life Writing written by Jennifer Cooke and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-16 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing is the first volume to identify and analyse the 'new audacity' of recent feminist writings from life. Characterised by boldness in both style and content, willingness to explore difficult and disturbing experiences, the refusal of victimhood, and a lack of respect for traditional genre boundaries, new audacity writing takes risks with its author's and others' reputations, and even, on occasion, with the law. This book offers an examination and critical assessment of new audacity in works by Katherine Angel, Alison Bechdel, Marie Calloway, Virginie Despentes, Tracey Emin, Sheila Heti, Juliet Jacques, Chris Krauss, Jana Leo, Maggie Nelson, Vanessa Place, Paul Preciado, and Kate Zambreno. It analyses how they write about women's self-authorship, trans experiences, struggles with mental illness, sexual violence and rape, and the desire for sexual submission. It engages with recent feminist and gender scholarship, providing discussions of vulnerability, victimhood, authenticity, trauma, and affect.
Download or read book Remembering French Algeria written by Amy L. Hubbell and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2015-06-01 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Remembering French Algeria examines the written and visual re-creation and preservation of identity in colonial Algeria from 1962 to the present by the Pieds-Noir, former French citizens of Algeria"--
Download or read book Romancing the Self in Early Modern Englishwomen s Life Writing written by Julie A. Eckerle and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-01 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Juxtaposing life writing and romance, this study offers the first book-length exploration of the dynamic and complex relationship between the two genres. In so doing, it operates at the intersection of several recent trends: interest in women's contributions to autobiography; greater awareness of the diversity and flexibility of auto/biographical forms in the early modern period; and the use of manuscripts and other material evidence to trace literacy practices. Through analysis of a wide variety of life writings by early modern Englishwomen-including Elizabeth Delaval, Dorothy Calthorpe, Ann Fanshawe, and Anne Halkett-Julie A. Eckerle demonstrates that these women were not only familiar with the controversial romance genre but also deeply influenced by it. Romance, she argues, with its unending tales of unsatisfying love, spoke to something in women's experience; offered a model by which they could recount their own disappointments in a world where arranged marriage and often loveless matches ruled the day; and exerted a powerful, pervasive pressure on their textual self-formations. Romancing the Self in Early Modern Englishwomen's Life Writing documents a vibrant secular form of auto/biographical writing that coexisted alongside numerous spiritual forms, providing a much more nuanced and complete understanding of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century women's reading and writing literacies.
Download or read book Autobiographical Writing by Early Modern Hispanic Women written by Elizabeth Teresa Howe and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-08 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women’s life writing in general has too often been ignored, dismissed, or relegated to a separate category in those few studies of the genre that include it. The present work addresses these issues and offers a countervailing argument that focuses on the contributions of women writers to the study of autobiography in Spanish during the early modern period. There are, indeed, examples of autobiographical writing by women in Spain and its New World empire, evident as early as the fourteenth-century Memorias penned by Doña Leonor López de Cordóba and continuing through the seventeenth-century Cartas of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. What sets these accounts apart, the author shows, are the variety of forms adopted by each woman to tell her life and the circumstances in which she adapts her narrative to satisfy the presence of male critics-whether ecclesiastic or political, actual or imagined-who would dismiss or even alter her life story. Analyzing how each of these women viewed her life and, conversely, how their contemporaries-both male and female-received and sometimes edited her account, Howe reveals the tension in the texts between telling a ’life’ and telling a ’lie’.
Download or read book Women Autobiography Theory written by Sidonie Smith and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first comprehensive guide to the burgeoning field of women's autobiography. Essays from 39 prominent critics and writers explore narratives across the centuries and from around the globe. A list of more than 200 women's autobiographies and a comprehensive bibliography provide invaluable information for scholars, teachers, and readers.
Download or read book Womanist Forefathers written by Gary L. Lemons and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2009-09-10 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces a lineage of pro-feminist black men to two early radical proponents of female equality.
Download or read book Postcolonial Criticism written by Bart Moore-Gilbert and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-05-12 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Post-colonial theory is a relatively new area in critical contemporary studies, having its foundations more Postcolonial Criticism brings together some of the most important critical writings in the field, and aims to present a clear overview of, and introduction to, one of the most exciting and rapidly developing areas of contemporary literary criticism. It charts the development of the field both historically and conceptually, from its beginnings in the early post-war period to the present day. The first phase of postcolonial criticism is recorded here in the pioneering work of thinkers like Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, and Gayatri Spivak. More recently, a new generation of academics have provided fresh assessments of the interaction of class, race and gender in cultural production, and this generation is represented in the work of Aijaz Ahmad, bell hooks, Homi Bhabha, Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd. Topics covered include negritude, national culture, orientalism, subalternity, ambivalence, hybridity, white settler societies, gender and colonialism, culturalism, commonwealth literature, and minority discourse. The collection includes an extensive general introduction which clearly sets out the key stages, figures and debates in the field. The editors point to the variety, even conflict, within the field, but also stress connections and parallels between the various figures and debates which they identify as central to an understanding of it. The introduction is followed by a series of ten essays which have been carefully chosen to reflect both the diversity and continuity of postcolonial criticism. Each essay is supported by a short introduction which places it in context with the rest of the author's work, and identifies how its salient arguments contribute to the field as a whole. This is a field which covers many disciplines including literary theory, cultural studies, philosophy, geography, economics, history and politics. It is designed to fit into the current modular arrangement of courses, and is therefore suitable for undergraduate and postgraduate courses which address postcolonial issues and the 'new' literatures in English.
Download or read book Take My Word written by Anne E. Goldman and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-09-01 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an innovative critique of traditional approaches to autobiography, Anne E. Goldman convincingly demonstrates that ethnic women can and do speak for themselves, even in the most unlikely contexts. Citing a wide variety of nontraditional texts—including the cookbooks of Nuevo Mexicanas, African American memoirs of midwifery and healing, and Jewish women's histories of the garment industry—Goldman illustrates how American women have asserted their ethnic identities and made their voices heard over and sometimes against the interests of publishers, editors, and readers. While the dominant culture has interpreted works of ethnic literature as representative of a people rather than an individual, the working women of this study insist upon their own agency in narrating rich and complicated self-portraits.
