Race and Sex across the French Atlantic

Race and Sex across the French Atlantic

Author: Frieda Ekotto

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2012-07-10

Total Pages: 128

ISBN-13: 0739141163

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Jean Genet's masterpiece Les N_gres was first published in 1958, in the midst of the Algerian war, and first performed at the ThZ%tre de Lut_ce in Paris in October 1959. Yet even though the play is more than 50 years old, it remains a fundamental contribution to critical race theory, as Genet unequivocally posits that no matter what a black person does or doesn't do, simply to be black in our times is itself a tragedy. Placing Genet in the context of Negritude movement, Race and Sex across the French Atlantic equally reveals and examines blackness within the African-American dialogue with a white French author's provocative questions about race: 'Is a black man always black?' and even more fundamentally, 'What is blackness?' Within this framework, to question 'blackness,' therefore, is to set out on an ontological quest, as 'blackness' has become a real, living thing in its own right within European ideology, social theory, and historical consciousness, even as Les N_gres has taken its place as a major text in the francophone and philosophical tradition of writing on race. In essence, this book concentrates on the way in which language-particularly the French language-has shaped ideas about race within transatlantic discourses, and, with its companion, continental philosophy, has also shaped the historical understanding of discourse on race. It navigates between multiple readings of race within the French Atlantic using Lorraine Hansberry's play Les Blancs; Dany Laferri_re's Comment faire l'amour avec un N_gre sans se fatiguer; Genet's dialogue with the Black Panthers; and different conceptions of the so-called N word. Race and Sex across the French Atlantic thus explores how Les N_gres offered a groundbreaking reading of how race functioned-and continues to function-as an all-pervasive discourse that provides a central principle around which society in general is organized. The play stages a deeply self-reflexive and critical examination of the very essence of 'blackness,' which, in Genet's world, is not simply about the color of a person's skin, but constitutes a critical function within socio-political and historical discourse. This book deals with an understanding of the concept of race in terms of alienation, and asks the question: Why, 50 years after the fact, given the long, historical, negative associations of the term Le N_gre in French language, does the title remain unchanged?


Sex, Sea, and Self

Sex, Sea, and Self

Author: Jacqueline Couti

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 1800859945

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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.


Vénus Noire

Vénus Noire

Author: Robin Mitchell

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2020-02-15

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 0820354333

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Even though there were relatively few people of color in postrevolutionary France, images of and discussions about black women in particular appeared repeatedly in a variety of French cultural sectors and social milieus. In Vénus Noire, Robin Mitchell shows how these literary and visual depictions of black women helped to shape the country’s postrevolutionary national identity, particularly in response to the trauma of the French defeat in the Haitian Revolution. Vénus Noire explores the ramifications of this defeat in examining visual and literary representations of three black women who achieved fame in the years that followed. Sarah Baartmann, popularly known as the Hottentot Venus, represented distorted memories of Haiti in the French imagination, and Mitchell shows how her display, treatment, and representation embodied residual anger harbored by the French. Ourika, a young Senegalese girl brought to live in France by the Maréchal Prince de Beauvau, inspired plays, poems, and clothing and jewelry fads, and Mitchell examines how the French appropriated black female identity through these representations while at the same time perpetuating stereotypes of the hypersexual black woman. Finally, Mitchell shows how demonization of Jeanne Duval, longtime lover of the poet Charles Baudelaire, expressed France’s need to rid itself of black bodies even as images and discourses about these bodies proliferated. The stories of these women, carefully contextualized by Mitchell and put into dialogue with one another, reveal a blind spot about race in French national identity that persists in the postcolonial present.


Paul Gilroy

Paul Gilroy

Author: Paul Williams

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 0415583969

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Paul Gilroy is a major intellectual figure whose writings have led contemporary debates around race and the 'Black Atlantic'. Gilroy argues that our ideas about race are socially constructed by colonisation, philosophy, science and consumer capitalism but that the survival tools generated by those vulnerable to racism offer the key to challenging these racist constructions. This volume: Introduces and contextualises Gilroy's writing and key ideas Explains and elaborates on many of the cultural references from Punk music to Hegelian thought Emphasises the international relevance of Gilroy's thought - expanding the examples to a variety of cities and countries Emphasising the timelessness and global relevance of Gilroy's work, this useful book will appeal to anyone approaching Gilroy for the first time or seeking to further their understanding of race relations and the Black Atlantic.


Venus of Khala-Kanti

Venus of Khala-Kanti

Author: Angèle Kingué

Publisher: Bucknell University Press

Published: 2014-11-04

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13: 1611486297

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Venus of Khala-Kanti is a tale of life-altering loss and mystical recovery. Set in an imaginary West African village that becomes a charming cul-de-sac, the unintended consequence of a national roadwork project gone awry, the story follows characters drawn with humor, irony, and empathy. The heart of the story beats with the laughter and tears of three women. Having faced incredible hardship, they come together to build their lives anew, armed with the age-old spirit of human resilience, understanding, and tenderness. Tapping into the very soil of Khala-Kanti, Bella, Assumta, and Clarisse construct spaces, both internal and external, where they and others can rejuvenate their bodies, minds, and spirits. They build the Good Hope Center, which embraces both the physical and the mystical landscape of the story. The Center fuels the restoration and growth of the village’s inhabitants, and offers sanctuary for those who visit and those who stay.


Paris and the Marginalized Author

Paris and the Marginalized Author

Author: Valérie K. Orlando

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2018-10-15

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 1498567045

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This volume of essays explores what it is that has brought marginalized and often exiled writers, seen as treacherous, alienated, and/or queer by their societies and nations together by way of Paris. Spanning from the inter-war period of the late 1920s to the present millennium, this volume considers many seminal questions that have influenced and continue to shape the realm of exiled writers who have sought refuge in Paris in order to write. Additionally, the volume’s essays seek to define alienation and marginalization as not solely subscribing to any single denominator -- sexual preference, gender, or nationality-- but rather as shared modes of being that allow authors to explore what it is to write from abroad in a place that is foreign yet freed of the constrictions of one’s home space. What makes Paris a particularly fruitful space that has allowed these authors and their writings to cross national, ethnic, racial, religious, and linguistic boundaries for over a century? What is it that brings together writers such as Moroccan Abdellah Taïa, Americans James Baldwin, Richard Wright and, most recently, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Shay Youngblood, Algerian Nabile Farès, Franco-Algerian Leila Sebbar, Canadian Nancy Huston, French Jean Genet and French-Vietnamese Linda Lê? How do their representations and understanding of transgression and marginalization transcend national, linguistic and ethnic boundaries, leading ultimately to revolution, both literary and literal? How does their writing help us to trace the history of Paris as a literary and artistic capital that has been useful for authors’ exploration of the Self, race and home country? These are but a few of the many questions explored in this volume. This book relies on an inherently intersectional approach, which is not based in reified identities, whether they be LGBT, postcolonial, ethnic, national, or linguistic. Instead, we posit that, for example, queer theory, and a “politics of difference”i can help us investigate the dynamics of these multiple identity positions, and hence provide a broader understanding of the lived experiences of these writers, and, perhaps, their readers from the early 1940s to the present.


After Foucault

After Foucault

Author: Lisa Downing

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-06-07

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13: 1108680038

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The work of Michel Foucault is much read, widely cited, and occasionally misunderstood. In response to this state of affairs, this collection aims to clarify, to contextualize, and to contribute to Foucauldian scholarship in a very specific way. Rather than offering either a conceptual introduction to Foucault's work, or a series of interventions aimed specifically at experts, After Foucault explores his critical afterlives, situates his work in current debates, and explains his intellectual legacy. As well as offering up-to-date assessments of Foucault's ongoing use in fields such as literary studies, sexuality studies, and history, chapters explore his relevance for urgent and emerging disciplines and debates, including ecology, animal studies, and the analysis of neoliberalism. Written in an accessible style, by leading experts, After Foucault demonstrates a commitment to taking seriously the work of a key twentieth-century thinker for contemporary academic disciplines, political phenomena, and cultural life.


Desiring Whiteness

Desiring Whiteness

Author: Caroline Séquin

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2024-10-15

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 150177705X

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Desiring Whiteness uncovers the intertwined histories of commercial sex and racial politics in France and the French Empire. Since the French Revolution of 1789, the absence of laws banning interracial marriages has served to reinforce two myths about modern France—first, that it is a sexual democracy and second, it is a color-blind nation where all French citizens can freely marry whomever they wish regardless of their race. Caroline Séquin challenges the narrative of French exceptionalism by revealing the role of prostitution regulation in policing intimate relationships across racial and colonial boundaries in the century following the abolition of slavery. Desiring Whiteness traces the rise and fall of the "French model" of prostitution policing in the "contact zones" of port cities and garrison towns across France and in Dakar, Senegal, the main maritime entry point of French West Africa. Séquin describes how the regulation of prostitution covertly policed racial relations and contributed to the making of white French identity in an imperial nation-state that claimed to be race-blind. She also examines how sex industry workers exploited, reinforced, or transgressed the racial boundaries of colonial rule. Brothels served as "gatekeepers of whiteness" in two arenas. In colonial Senegal, white-only brothels helped deter French colonists from entering unions with African women and producing mixed-race children, thus consolidating white minority rule. In the metropole, brothels condoned interracial sex with white sex workers while dissuading colonial men from forming long-term attachments with white French women. Ultimately, brothels followed a similar racial logic that contributed to upholding white supremacy.


Don't Whisper Too Much and Portrait of a Young Artiste from Bona Mbella

Don't Whisper Too Much and Portrait of a Young Artiste from Bona Mbella

Author: Frieda Ekotto

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2019-04-03

Total Pages: 211

ISBN-13: 1684480280

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Don't Whisper Too Much and Bona Mbella present love stories between African women in a positive light. In presenting the emotional and romantic lives of gay African women, Ekotto addresses how female sexuality is often marked by violence, and yet is also a place for emotional connection, pleasure and agency.