Violence in Francophone African and Caribbean Women's Literature
Publication Year: 2009
Published by: University of Nebraska Press
Title Page, Copyright
Download PDF (39.6 KB)
Introduction: Geographies of Pain
Download PDF (93.2 KB)
By sharing a history dominated by the violent disruptions of slavery, colonialism, and latent neocolonialism, African and Caribbean peoples belong to what Françoise Lionnet calls “geographies of pain.”1 Caribbeanist Jack Corzani identifies various forms of this historical violence. ...
1. Exclusion as Violence: Frantz Fanon, Black Women, and Colonial Violence
Download PDF (102.4 KB)
Critical studies of African and Caribbean women writing remain scarce.1 The reasons for this absence are twofold. First, at the beginning of the formation of African literary studies in the mid-twentieth century, there were relatively few women writers in Africa and the Caribbean. ...
2. Representing Colonial Violence: Michèle Lacrosil's Cajou, Ken Bugul's, Le Baobab fou, and Ousmane Sembène's La noire de . . .
Download PDF (147.7 KB)
In this chapter, I posit that the selected works by Michèle Lacrosil, Ken Bugul, and Ousmane Sembène complicate Fanon’s formula for colonial violence by offering a specifically female perspective on the experience and legacy of colonialism’s brutality. This chapter discusses these...
3. Writing Familial Violence: Storytelling and Integrational Violence in Simone Schwarz-Bart's Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle and Calixthe Beyla's Tu t'appelleras Tanga
Download PDF (150.9 KB)
In her article “Sheroes and Villains: Conceptualizing Colonial and Contemporary Violence against Women in Africa,” Amina Mama locates the source of contemporary African models of patriarchal violence in colonial states. These states not only used the famous colonial formula...
4. Sites of Violence: Language, the Body, and Women's Deterritorialization in Gisèle Pineau's L'espérance-macadam Calixthe Beyala's C'est le soleil qui m'a brûlée
Download PDF (151.0 KB)
Calixthe Beyala and Gisèle Pineau explore further the concept of “geographies of pain” by depicting intimate space, language, and the body as sites of pain, exile, and resistance to violence.1 In the tradition of women’s literature, the two writers turn their attention to internal...
5. War and Political Violence
Download PDF (142.5 KB)
In this chapter, I examine how women writers redefine war in their writing about political violence. The term war normally refers to a “hostile contention by means of armed forces, carried on between nations, states, or rulers, or between parties in the same nation or state...
Download PDF (50.5 KB)
As African and Caribbean writings become ever more intimistes (intimist)—as authors present more intimate and deeply private topics — an examination of the subject of violence and particularly its gendered form in literature is crucial to the understanding of Francophone women writers. ...
Download PDF (69.5 KB)
Download PDF (73.0 KB)
Download PDF (85.3 KB)
Publication Year: 2009