The Body in Francophone Literature

Much of Francophone literature is a response to an elaborate discourse that served to bolster colonial French notions of national grandeur and to justify expansion of French territories overseas. A form of colonial exoticism saw the colonized subject as a physical, cultural, aesthetic and even sexual singularity. Francophone writers sought to rehabilitate the status of non–Western peoples who, through the use of anthropometric techniques, had been racially classified as inferior or primitive.
Drawing on various Francophone texts, this collection of new essays offers a compelling study of the literary body—both corporeal and figurative. Topics include the embodiment of diasporic identity, the body politic in prison writing, women’s bodies, and the body’s expression of trauma inflicted by genocidal violence.

El Hadji Malick Ndiaye is an assistant professor of French and global African studies at Seattle University. He is also a well received poet and critic.
Moussa Sow is an associate professor of French and African studies at the College of New Jersey. His most recent publications appeared in the Journal of African Cinemas. He lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Edited by El Hadji Malick Ndiaye and Moussa Sow
Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages: 184
Bibliographic Info: notes, bibliographies, index
Copyright Date: 2016
pISBN: 978-0-7864-9466-8
eISBN: 978-1-4766-2536-2
Imprint: McFarland

Table of Contents


Foreword

Dominic Thomas 1

Introduction (El Hadji Malick Ndiaye) 7

Part I. Socializing Bodies

Perceived Body, Figurative Body (Isaac Bazié) 14

The Body of the ­Reader-Author: The Case of Michel Tremblay (Sara Bédard-Goulet) 26

Embodying Diasporic Identity: Materiality, Transformation and Creation in the Work of Abdellah Taïa (Ryan K. Schroth) 42

“Opacité charnelle”: Reading Botanical Metaphors of Creole Identity in Patrick Chamoiseau’s “L’esclave vieil homme et le molosse” (Nadège Dufort) 58

Postmodern and Postcolonial Francophone African Autofictional Strategies of the Writing of the Self (Karen ­Ferreira-Meyers) 72

Part II. Performing Bodies

Performative Bodies in Nina Bouraoui’s Garçon manqué (Ann-Sophie Persson) 84

Corporeal Expressions in Fatou Diome’s Writing (Moussa Sow) 96

The Diallobé and the Pulaaku: Ethnic, Ethic and Epistemic Use of the Body in Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s Novels (El Hadji Malick Ndiaye) 109

Part III. Violating Bodies

The Body Speaks: Naming Violation in Mujawayo’s and Belhaddad’s SurVivantes (Elizabeth Applegate) 126

Reading the Body Politic in the Prison Writings of Abdellatif Laâbi (Victor Reinking) 142

Nelly Arcan: Women’s Bodies and What Is Left (Anna Rocca) 155

About the Contributors 169

Index 171