CFP bilingual april 20

2015

When we think of the literature produced before, during, and after the two World Wars we rarely think of the Caribbean as a site of significant literary output. Typically, we privilege a white, male, European literary voice. If we do consider literature from elsewhere, it usually follows a pattern of normative privilege. Therefore, it is useful to consider the female Caribbean voice and its response to colonialism, racism, and gender violence during the period between 1914 and 1945. Claire-Solange, âme-africaine offers arguably one of the best examples of a female Caribbean perspective on World War I as well as global politics. Although Suzanne Lacascade's novel has been obscured and lost over time, the Martinican author portrays everyday scenarios in France during World War I to empower marginalized Caribbean women during one of the most tumultuous moments in the early 20 th Century. While Lacascade shifts our lens to the First World War, Mayotte Capécia's Je suis Martiniquaise is set, in part, during the blockade years in Martinique during World War II under Admiral Georges Robert. Together, these two Martinican female writers-even though they are less well known than their canonical male compatriots Aimé Césaire, Édouard Glissant, and Patrick Chamoiseau-lucidly portray the everyday lives of mulatto women in Martinique and in France as they negotiate their place on the periphery of French society. I argue below that through their interrogations of the everyday during these two wars that Lacascade and Capécia generate female protagonists who challenge racial, cultural, gender, and sexual stereotypes, which have historically rendered mixed race women as marginalized figures in Francophone Caribbean literature.

2004

Critics have tended to examine the portrayals of women in African literature either by focusing mainly on works by men or by emphasizing only women's texts. My dissertation looks at both men and women authors, tracing the representations of women in African writings from the earliest literary endeavors of Francophone African writers to contemporary times. By considering at least two authors of each generation of men and women writers, the thesis examines the interplay of colonialism, religion, patriarchy and traditional practices and their contribution to the subordination of African women. My adoption of the term subalternity to read African texts draws on Gramsci's idea of revolt, the episodic march of the oppressed to achieve what he called permanent victory. My use of the word subaltern here relates to the African woman subordinated by colonial, religious, patriarchal, and traditional forces. ,I .,.. V Francophone colonial and post-colonial writings such as Senghor's Chants d'ombre, Diop's Coups de pi/on, Beti's Mission terminee and Le Pauvre Christ de Bomba, Kourouma's Les Soleils des independances and Ousmane's Les Bouts de bois de Dieu represent traditional depictions of women by male authors. Ba's Une si longue lettre and Un chant ecarlate, Rawiri's Fureurs et eris) de femme, Keita's Rebe/le and Yaou's Le Prix de la revolte, in contrast, illustrate the roles of women as seen through th~ eyes of African female writers. My aim in considering literary works by both men and women is to offer a balanced account of the evolution of the portrayal of women in sub-Saharan African narrative. I make a judicious use of certain Western theories even though I work within the framework of Third World cultures. I am aware of the social and cultural differences that make it important to heed Nnaemeka's warnings that anybody working on African texts should listen to the heartbeat of lgboland and respect African values. Nevertheless, I am convinced that listening tb the heartbeat of the Wesl can help to redefine some of the African traditions that subalternize women.

IJASS JOURNAL, 2023

and access to memory and ancestry (remembrance), promote a female anticolonial performance that claims, aestheticizes, manages and conceives diasporic new territories (cartographic and affective). We point out that, thinking from the black body's perspective of the territory is to understand that this body-due to kidnappings and diasporasassumes the role of a shelter of the ancestry that, when accessed by the processes of remembrance (incorporation), points to the forging of a new history. We also suggest the primordial function of black women and loving practices as healing gestures in the movement of memory maintenance within migratory processes.

SubStance, 1990

The Martiniquean writer and activist Frantz Fanon has famously described the process of formation and being of the so-called ‘colonial subject’ from a psychoanalytic perspective. One of the main objections against his view of colonialism is however its complete disregard of the female colonial subject. Ania Loomba (2005) adresses this issue from various angles, and in this essay I discuss the issue further, asking to what degree the critique of Fanon’s absence of gender sensitivity is relevant to postcolonial studies.

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, 2005

Racial discrimination, colonialism, marginalization, and imperial politics are the components of Martinican author Suzanne Lacascade's 1924 novel, Claire-Solange, âme africaine. This little-known work is shrouded in mystery. Less information is available about the author or under what circumstances she conceptualized and completed her novel. Lacascade probably contributed to various reviews and journals of the first days of the Négritude movement. The novel offers one of the first discourses on race, racial mixing, hierarchy, and colonialism as construed by blacks and whites. The author defies the power of men over women in French society of the early twentieth century. Racialized parameters are synthesized, most significantly, through the protagonist Claire-Solange's views and opinions on, two environments: the first is France, whose language she speaks fluently but in which she feels foreign; and the second African, a mythical place to which she is drawn due to her African ancestry filtered through her island home of Martinique. The author offers her readers a window on the life of a mulatta woman who is caught in the middle of white and black, forced, in the end, to live in a French, beige in-between, forever considered an étrangère because of her color.

2022

2013

Womanist ideological orientations have been highlighted in many African narratives in French expression written by both male and female authors. Equally, in Marcan narratives, womanist postures are entrenched in the relationship between Jesus and women as opposed to representations of women’s marginalization and oppression found in the Jewish culture. Literature is a vital tool for articulation and interpretation of events, realities and aspirations of women in particular in the society. Marcan’s account of the Anointing Woman at Bethany and Haemorrhaging Woman are interrogated to bring out womanist orientations while novels of Adelaïde Fassinou (a new generation of Francophone African writer) and Henri Lopes (old generation of Francophone writer) are analysed to highlight the womanist tendencies adopted by female characters for the purpose of comparing it with Marcan womanist inclinations in order to foreground that women’s experiences in patriarchal setting are similar. This was d...

Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy

As part of the commemoration of the 70th anniversary of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, the following reflections are akin to his critical work on the psychoaffective impact of colonialism. Fanon’s notion of the epidermalization of inferiority has inspired my analysis of the socio-political struggles in Haiti and the complex antagonisms shaped by colonialism, contemporary political personalities, and constantly clashing perceptions of race, gender and nation. I turn to Fanon’s notion of the epidermalization of inferiority in Black Skin, White Masks to explore the effects of French colonization on the female protagonist’s psyche in Marie-Vieux Chauvet’s Amour. Chauvet was born just short of a decade prior to Fanon, and writes, like him, in the moment of anti- colonial struggle in the Caribbean, exploring like Black Skin, White Masks the psychological effects and affects of colonialism. A Fanonian reading of the text illustrates the psychological impact of colonialism on women...

Journal of The History of Sexuality, 2011