Academic literature on the topic 'African literature (French) African literature (French) Women in literature. Women and literature'

Arab culture and the religion of Islam permeated the traditions and customs of the African sub-Sahara for centuries. When the early colonizers from Europe arrived in Africa they encountered these influences and spontaneously perceived the African cultures to be ideologically hybridized and more compatible with Islam than with the ideologies of the west. This difference progressively endorsed a perception of Africa and the east being “exotic” and was as such depicted in early paintings and writings. This depiction contributed to a cultural misunderstanding of Africa and facilitated colonialism. This article briefly explores some of the facets of these early texts and paintings. In the first place the scripts by early Muslim scholars, who critically analyzed early western perceptions, were discussed against the textual interpretation of east-west perceptions such as the construction of “the other”. Secondly, the travel writers and painters between 1860 and 1930, who created a visual embodiment of the exotic, were discussed against the politics behind the French Realist movement that developed in France during that same period. This included the construction of a perception of exoticness as represented by literature descriptions and visual art depictions of the women of the Orient. These perceptions rendered Africa as oriental with African subjects depicted as “exotic others”.

SAMLA's seventieth annual convention will be held in Birmingham at the Sheraton Civic Center from 10 to 12 November. William C. Calin will present the keynote address; George Ella Lyon will give the creative address; and French, German, and Spanish plenary addresses will also be featured. Sonia Sanchez will make a special appearance, and other sessions will focus on Birmingham and Alabama writers, gender and race studies, and human rights in literature and culture. Last year's highly successful reading by contemporary writers, sponsored by the literary magazine Five Points, will be repeated. Graduate students will host a poets' circle, and a special performance of Hemingway stories will take place. Among the twenty special sessions are African Influence on Western Literatures; The Holocaust in Literature and Film; Rhetorics, Rhetoricians, and the Teaching of Rhetoric; Early Modern Women of Spain; and Epics and Literature at the Millennium. During the varied program (over 140 sessions), the convention will feature issues of technology, pedagogy, and professional concerns and will offer a number of opportunities to meet and socialize. Cash bars will be held for faculty members in two-year colleges, Feministas Unidas, and gay and lesbian studies. Side trips are planned to the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and the Birmingham Museum of Art. A full copy of the program will be available on the SAMLA Web site in July.

Feminists feel that in literary criticism not enough consideration is given to feminism as an ideology in the production of texts. According to them, existing literary criticism is strongly man-centred. This is especially true of the practice of South African literary criticism. Although feminism does not have at its disposal a formulated feminist literary criticism, a great deal of research has been done in this direction abroad. This is especially the case in Europe and America. Feminist literary critics apply themselves to the representation of the woman in works by male authors and an analysis of feminine experience in the production of texts by women. This article is an exploration of the Anglo-American and French approaches in feminist literary criticism. An attempt is made to formulate the aims of a possible South African feminist literary criticism in order that not only the general norms, but also the feminist codes in the production of a text, speak towards the final interpretation of a work.

In any consideration of theatre in the French Caribbean, the name Césaire is bound to be mentioned. Aimé Césaire's La Tragédie du roi Christophe (1963) is the most widely- known play in French by a black dramatist, and is now even in the repertoire of the Comédie-Française, and his plays figure widely in checklists of ‘African’ theatre. A revealing contrast can be made between the epic dramas of Aimé Césaire, written for an international audience, especially the newly independent black nations of the 1960s, and the work of his daughter, Ina. He tackles from the standpoint of Négritude major themes of historical drama: the nature of sovereignty, the forging of nationhood; he storms the heights of tragic poetry in French. She is attentive, not to the lonely hero constructing his Haitian Citadel of rock, but to the Creole voices of the grassroots. She brings to the stage the lives of ordinary women, the lore and legends that sustained the slaves and their descendants. Her achievement should of course be assessed away from her father's shadow, but the ‘divergent orientation of the two generations’ also suggests the greater confidence today in the role of Creole language and oral literature, and in a serious theatre within Martinique.

IntroductionResearch has established that various forms of stigma (HIV stigma, gender non-conforming stigma and same-gender sex stigma) exist across Sub-Saharan Africa and have consequences for the utilisation of HIV prevention and care services. Stigmas are typically investigated in HIV literature individually or through investigating individual populations and the various stigmas they may face. The concept of intersectionality highlights the interconnected nature of social categorisations and their ability to create interdependent systems of discrimination based on gender, race, sexuality and so on. Drawing from perspectives on intersectionality, intersectional stigma denotes the convergence of multiple marginalised identities within an individual or a group, the experiences of stigma associated with these identities as well as the synergistic impact of these experiences on health and well-being. With respect to HIV, public health scholars can examine the impacts of intersectional stigmas on HIV prevention and care utilisation.Methods and analysisReviewers will search systematically through MEDLINE, Global Health, Embase, Scopus, Web of Science Core Collection and Africa Index Medicus and citations for quantitative studies, qualitative studies and grey literature that include data on stigma and HIV among men who have sex with men and women who have sex with women in Sub-Saharan Africa. Eligible studies will include primary or secondary data on stigma related to HIV risk factors experienced by this population. Studies will be written in French or English and be published between January 1991 and November 2020. All screening and data extraction will be performed in duplicate, and if discrepancies arise, they will be settled by GM’RA, LEN, DD or AO. Findings from this study will be reported according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews.Ethics and disseminationEthics approval is not required as there will be no human participants and no protected data will be used in this study. We will disseminate findings through peer-reviewed manuscripts, conferences and webinars.

David Scott; Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Shalina Puri)Rebecca J. Scott; Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery (Olivia Maria Gomes da Cunha)Patrick Bellegarde-Smith (ed.); Fragments of Bone: Neo-African Religions in a New World (Dianne M. Stewart)Londa Schiebinger; Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (J.D. La Fleur)F. Abiola Irele, Simon Gikandi (eds.);The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature (A. James Arnold)Sean X. Goudie; Creole America: The West Indies and the Formation of Literature and Culture in the New Republic (J. Bradford Anderson)Doris Garraway; The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean (Charles Forsdick)Adélékè Adéèkó; The Slave’s Rebellion: Fiction, History, Orature (Owen Robinson)J. Brooks Bouson; Jamaica Kincaid: Writing Memory, Writing Back to the Mother (Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert)Gary Wilder; The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (Nick Nesbitt)Fernando Picó; History of Puerto Rico: A Panorama of its People (Francisco A. Scarano)Peter E. Siegel (ed.); Ancient Borinquen: Archaeology and Ethnohistory of Native Puerto Rico (William F. Keegan) Magali Roy-Féquière; Women, Creole Identity, and Intellectual Life in Early Twentieth-Century Puerto Rico (Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel)Katherine E. Browne; Creole Economics: Caribbean Cunning under the French Flag (David Beriss)Louis A. Pérez, Jr; To Die in Cuba: Suicide and Society (Matt D. Childs)John Lawrence Tone; War and Genocide in Cuba, 1895-1898 (Gillian McGillivray)Frank Argote-Freyre; Fulgencio Batista: From Revolutionary to Strongman (Javier Figueroa-De Cárdenas)Juanita de Barros, Audra Diptee, David V. Trotman (eds.); Beyond Fragmentation: Perspectives on Caribbean History (Bernard Moitt)Matthew Mulcahy; Hurricanes and Society in the British Greater Caribbean, 1624-1783 (Bonham C. Richardson)Michaeline A. Crichlow; Negotiating Caribbean Freedom: Peasants and the State in Development (Christine Chivallon)Peta Gay Jensen; The Last Colonials: The Story of Two European Families in Jamaica (Karl Watson)Marc Tardieu; Les Antillais à Paris: D’hier à aujourd’hui (David Beriss)Rhonda D. Frederick; “Colón Man a Come”: Mythographies of Panamá Canal Migration (Michael L. Conniff)James Robertson; Gone is the Ancient Glory: Spanish Town, Jamaica, 1534-2000 (Philip D. Morgan)Philippe R. Girard; Paradise Lost: Haiti’s Tumultuous Journey from Pearl of the Caribbean to Third World Hotspot (Carolle Charles)Michael Deibert; Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Carolle Charles)Ellen de Vries; Suriname na de binnenlandse oorlog (Aspha E. Bijnaar)In: New West Indian Guide/ Nieuwe West-Indische Gids no. 82 (2008), no: 1-2, Leiden

This article tells the story, and analyzes the development, of a “staged metaphor” for the translation process, from its chance inception over ten years ago, to the more recent revision and staging of the script. In 2005, I was teaching world literature at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco, while also researching the writing of Irish and North African women. I chose to focus on those women writing in Irish, Tachelhit, Arabic, or French, whose work had been translated into English. I was initially inspired by Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill’s poem, “The Language Issue,” which compares the "sending forth" of her writing to a potential reader, to the story of Moses being discovered by Pharoah’s daughter. My ultimate goal was to produce a chamber theatre play, based on the Irish and North African texts, which would dramatize a metaphor for the translation process. This was an outgrowth of my doctoral work, in which I had drawn on oral interpretation theorists, who see the performance of literary texts as an accepted means of doing literary criticism. Accordingly, I also expanded the project to include the observations of translation theorists, and I incorporated these into the creation of the script for a chamber theatre performance. After directing a staging of the script in Morocco in 2007, I realized that I needed to add more choreographed movement, and to incorporate the character of Moses’s and Myriam’s mother into the metaphor. The addition of dance, and the foregrounding of the relationship between Myriam and her mother, draws unapologetically on female relationships. It is my conclusion that the revised metaphor, with the addition of these elements, is validated by Yves Bonnefoy’s and Henri Meschonnic's depictions of “translation as relationship with an author,” and that, the metaphor does indeed “provide . . . fresh insights.”

Background Mobile health (mHealth) video interventions are often transferred across settings. Although the outcomes of these transferred interventions are frequently published, the process of adapting such videos is less described, particularly within and across lower-income contexts. This study fills a gap in the literature by outlining experiences and priorities adapting a suite of South African maternal nutrition videos to the context of rural Burkina Faso. Objective The objective of this study was to determine the key components in adapting a suite of maternal nutrition mHealth videos across settings. Methods Guided by the principles of human-centered design, this qualitative study included 10 focus group discussions, 30 in-depth interviews, and 30 observations. We first used focus group discussions to capture insights on local nutrition and impressions of the original (South African) videos. After making rapid adjustments based on these focus group discussions, we used additional methods (focus group discussions, in-depth interviews, and observations) to identify challenges, essential video refinements, and preferences in terms of content delivery. All data were collected in French or Dioula, recorded, transcribed, and translated as necessary into French before being thematically coded by two authors. Results We propose a 3-pronged Video Adaptation Framework that places the aim of video adaptation at the center of a triangle framed by end recipients, health workers, and the environment. End recipients (here, pregnant or lactating mothers) directed us to (1) align the appearance, priorities, and practices of the video’s protagonist to those of Burkinabe women; (2) be mindful of local realities whether economic, health-related, or educational; and (3) identify and routinely reiterate key points throughout videos and via reminder cards. Health workers (here, Community Health Workers and Mentor Mothers delivering the videos) guided us to (1) improve technology training, (2) simplify language and images, and (3) increase the frequency of their engagements with end recipients. In terms of the environment, respondents guided us to localize climate, vegetation, diction, and how foods are depicted. Conclusions Design research provided valuable insights in terms of developing a framework for video adaptation across settings, which other interventionists and scholars can use to guide adaptations of similar interventions.

This article examines the age and sex composition of the Atlantic slave trade in the belief it was of considerable significance in shaping black society in both Africa and the Americas. Focusing on the French slave trade, two main samples are analysed. One is composed of 177,000 slaves transported in French ships during the years 1714–92, which is taken from the Répertoire des expéditions négrières of Jean Mettas and Serge Daget. The other, derived from nearly 400 estate inventories, consists of more than 13,300 Africans who lived on Saint Domingue plantations in the period 1721–97. The results are compared with existing knowledge of the demo-graphic composition of the Atlantic slave trade to show the range of variation that existed through time between different importing and exporting regions, and to shed light on the forces of supply and demand that determined the proportions of men, women and children who were sold as slaves across the ocean. Significant and consistent contrasts are found between different ethnic groups in Africa and different slaveholding societies in the New World, many of them thus far unnoticed in the scholarly literature.

Resumo: Conceição Evaristo é uma escritora afro-brasileira de grande relevância no cenário nacional atual, sobretudo por construir uma literatura de resistência voltada para as questões etnorraciais e de gênero, num movimento interseccional que envolve também a categoria de classe. Sua produção literária, no geral, é pautada na sua vivência de mulher negra submetida às condições de subalternização diversas no Brasil e pela evocação da memória de seus ancestrais africanos como forma de construir um contradiscurso sobre a luta dos negros no nosso país. Neste artigo, apresentamos o nosso discurso de compreensão do conto “O sagrado pão dos filhos”, do livro Histórias de leves enganos e parecenças, resultante de nossa leitura e interpretação desse texto e da experiência de leitura compartilhada num círculo de leitura com participantes do evento Memórias de Baobá, em Fortaleza. Utilizamos como fundamento da análise literária do conto os dispositivos da crítica literária, da abordagem bakhtiniana da linguagem e da análise do discurso francesa. Podemos dizer que o conto “O sagrado pão dos filhos” foi percebido em sua tessitura estética complexa e reveladora de como a literatura constrói o humano, configurando um gesto decolonial, que faz ecoar vozes silenciadas subjacentes ao processo de subalternização racial tanto econômico quanto simbólico. Palavras-chave: Literatura afro-brasileira. Conto. Crítica. Resistência. Círculos de leitura. LITERATURE AS AN ACT OF RESISTANCE IN “O SAGRADO PÃO DOS FILHOS”, BY CONCEIÇÃO EVARISTO Abstract: Conceição Evaristo is an Afro-Brazilian writer of great relevance in the current Brazilian scenario. She has contributed for building a resistance literature focused on ethno-racial and gender issues, in an intersectional movement which also includes the class category. Her literary production, in general, is guided by her experience as a black woman, submitted to various subaltern conditions in Brazil and by evoking the memory of her African ancestors as a way of constructing a counter-discourse about the black struggle in the country. This paper presents a comprehension discourse of the short story “O sagrado pão dos filhos”, from the book Histórias de leves enganos e parecenças, which resulted from our reading and interpretation of this text and from the experience of a shared reading in a reading circle at Memórias de Baobá, an even held in the city of Fortaleza, Brazil. Literary criticism, Bakhtinian approach of language as well as French discourse analysis were used as basis for the literary analysis of the short story. “O sagrado pão dos filhos” was perceived in its complex aesthetic texture revealing how literature builds the human, setting up a decolonial gesture, echoing silent voices that are subjacent to the racial process of economic and symbolic subalternization. Keywords: Afro-Brazilian literature. Short story. Critical. Resistance. Reading circles.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2004.
Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 175-186). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

This dissertation examines the importance of urban space in the works of feminist writers from France, Quebec, the Maghreb and Francophone West Africa. Each author writes women as subjects of their own experience in the city, identifies the representations of power and gender in urban landscapes, restores a feminist voice to the polis and supports women's claim to enfranchisement in urban space. My analysis is based upon the fundamental premise that urban space reflects power dynamics and is, like gender, a social and political construction borne of a dominant patriarchal ideology. The urban type of the female flaneuse, or ambulant heroine, is prevalent in several of the texts. These are women whose personal trajectories through the metropolis serve as a common referant to define their identity. Exploitation, disciplinary surveillance and disillusion characterize (1) Claire Etcherelli's urban dystopia in Elise ou la vraie vie. (2) Annie Ernaux's observations of life in the periphery of Paris in the Journal du dehors are centered on the market economy of the city and women's status as commodity. The deviant behavior of (3) Andree Chedid's virtually homeless, elderly heroine in La cite fertile thinly veils a provocative inquiry into the notion of urban identity. (4) Christine de Pizan and the Quebecoise writer, (5) Nicole Brossard both employ the metaphor of construction--architectural and textual--and share utopian visions of women's writing as the site for feminist praxis and cultural transformation. (6) Nina Bouraoui's cloistered Algerian heroine in La Voyeuse interdite and the women in (7) Assia Djebar's novels dare to defy and transgress the boundaries which exclude women from the urban realm in the Maghreb. (8) Calixthe Beyala's novels depict young African women struggling with issues of identity and survival in metropolises dominated by a repressive, patriarchal mentality. Throughout the texts, the city appears in multiple guises: as a text, a body, a marketplace, and a prison. For these authors, writing on the city constitutes a feminist act asserting women's right to claim a voice in that space. These works situate the city as a locus of cultural and political critique, whose spatial configurations reflect the social constructions of gender.

Dans le contexte des indépendances des anciennes colonies françaises, la verve poétique d’auteurs « engagés » tels qu’Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor ou Léon-Gontran Damas est indissociable de la dénonciation de la colonisation et du combat politique pour l’émancipation. Les intellectuels, les hommes de Lettres, de culture, les artistes condamnent fermement les impérialismes européens. Pour les tenants de la « Négritude », la poésie relaie le témoignage le plus évident de l’engagement politique et littéraire. Cette écriture poétique, construite à la fois sur des pratiques liées l’oralité héritées de l’Afrique et sur des formes prosodiques relativement classiques, fonde le lieu où l’on peut faire passer des messages politiques, tout en revendiquant une culture africaine. Introduire par la suite l’écriture romanesque en Afrique subsaharienne et y reprendre les thèmes de l’esclavage, de la colonisation, de l’aliénation du colonisé, du néocolonialisme deviennent des opérations en vue de processus constructeurs ; il s’agit d’ouvrir une vision nouvelle du monde, en imprimant à la langue française la trace créative de son auteur en ses représentations. On assiste donc à une revendication des nationalisations des littératures francophones. Ainsi de la littérature camerounaise ou de la littérature congolaise — par exemple, Ahmadou Kourouma dit contribuer à une littérature malinké. Tchicaya U. Tam’si affirme que si le français le colonise, il le colonise à son tour, car, paradoxalement, la révolte du colonisé s’appuie sur la langue française du colonisateur, tout en s’efforçant de déplacer celle-ci par l’écriture. La littérature d’expression française en Afrique subsaharienne est le lieu des différences, et des « différances » car elle porte la trace des multiples trajectoires sociologiques, et devient par sa diversité un lieu de créativité, de liberté et d’hybridité. Nous voyons aussi apparaître le roman de contestation politique contre les dictatures, la corruption, les guerres civiles, à l’exemple d’Ahmadou Kourouma écrivant Allah n’est pas obligé sans plus se préoccuper du canon de la langue, mais en pratiquant une « langue pourrie » pour décrire une guerre atroce. C’est une créativité semblable à celle qui est à l’origine du créole, du français petit-nègre, du camfranglais, et que la littérature d’Afrique subsaharienne explore. C’est dans cette perspective ouverte par les pratiques subversives de l’écriture et de la lecture que s’inscrit l’émancipation des femmes en Afrique. Calixthe Beyala est en ce sens emblématique de l’évolution du statut des femmes et de leur place dans la société, dépassant le clivage sexuel masculin/féminin. Ce processus prend sa source dans le mouvement d’ensemble des indépendances et du post-colonialisme. Ainsi les femmes se sont-elles illustrées par leur écriture, véritable prise de parole dans un espace public traditionnellement réservé aux hommes. Le roman des femmes écrivains en Afrique subsaharienne s’attache à décrire les pratiques traditionnelles, la polygamie, les mariages forcés. Ayant acquis une autonomie de parole, ces écrivains se donnent le pouvoir d’intervenir dans le débat public. Cette forme d’émancipation conquiert un langage traditionnellement réservé aux hommes. La langue violente, argotique, obscène ou pornographique n’est plus un monopole masculin. Elle est investie autrement par les écrivains femmes qui peuvent dès lors se dire elles-mêmes
In the context of the independences of former French colonies, the poetic impetus of militant authors such as Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor or Léon-Gontran Damas is adamantly linked to the rebuttal of colonialism and to political activism. Intellectuals, writers, and artists strongly condemn European imperialisms. For the “Négritude” poets, poetry stands as the most obvious testimony of political and literary commitment. Their poetic works, relying both on oral practices inherited from Africa and on relatively classic prosodic styles, is the vehicle for political messages and reclaiming of African culture. Subsequently, novel writing in sub-Saharian Africa tackles more and more themes of slavery, colonization, colonial alienation, neo-colonialism, all of this becoming empowering processes. The question is to open on a renewed vision of the world, giving the French language a new creative trace, through the authors’ representation. Therefore, Francophone literature reclaims its singularity. This is especially true with Cameroon and Congo: for instance, Ahmadou Kourouma posits that his literature is malinké. Tchicaya U. Tam’si declares that if the French language is colonizing him, then he colonizes it in turn. The colonized rebellion paradoxically leans on the French colonizer language, while trying to displace and advance it through writing. Francophone literature in sub-Saharian Africa is the place of differences and of “différances”, for it bears the traces of many sociological reflexions, and becomes, through its diversity, a place for creativity, liberty and hybridity. We also witness the rise of political protest novel against dictatures, corruption, civil wars ; for example Ahmadou Kourouma, writing Allah n’est pas obligé, does not bother anymore with the rules of literature but excels in the practice of a “rotten language” to describe an atrocious war. This is a form of creativity similar to the one that give birth to creole, “français petit-nègre”, “camfranglais” and one that African sub-Saharian literature explore. It is in this perspective opened by subversive writing and reading practices that women emancipation in Africa takes place. The case of Calixthe Beyala, among others, illustrates this evolution of the status of women in society, beyond the sexual male/female divide. This process stems from post-colonialism and independentist movements gaining power and focus in the XXth century. Women distinguish themselves thanks to their writing and speech in a public sphere reserved to men. Novels written by sub-Saharian African women carefully describe traditional practices, polygamy, forced marriages. These writers, through their acquired freedom speech, have gained the power to participate in the public debate. This form of emancipation takes hold of a language and an art formerly reserved to men because of traditions. Violence, slang words, obscene or pornographic language are no longer part of a male monopoly on poetic language. This poetic creation is vested differently by women writers, who are therefore able to express themselves

The central assumption of this study is that the awareness of a historically constructed, culturally sanctioned condition of subalternity is at the heart of the fictional production of Francophone African women writers. Subalternity here is viewed as a narrative and spatial continuum inside which African women have to negotiate issues relating to subjecthood and identity, both marked by gender and colonialism. Various definitions of 'the subaltern' are relevant, ranging from Antonio Gramsci's to those of the South Asian Subaltern Studies group, and to John Beverley's and Fredric Jameson's discussions. Jameson's emphasis on subalternity as "the feelings of mental inferiority nad habits of subservience and obedience which... develop in situations of domination - most dramatically in the experience of colonized peoples" (Jameson, 1981) is crucial, because it demonstrates the constructedness of that ontological condition. The approach adopted here aims to include gender as a category in a discourse that often excludes it, and to bring social science-oriented concepts into dialogue with literary theory and criticism. Combined with a discussion of Africa-influenced versions of feminist theory (stiwanism, negofeminism, motherism), Subaltern studies provides a space for the emergence of a south-south postcolonial debate that can throw new light on writing by African women. Fictional works by Therese Kuoh-Moukoury, Mariama Ba, Aminata Maiga Ka, Angele Rawiri, Philomene Bassek, Evelyne Mpoudi-Ngolle, Regina Yaou, Fatou Keita, and Abibatou Traore are read as conveying the various stages of consciousness on the part of the subaltern. Kuoh-Moukoury's Rencontres essentielles (1969), Maiga Ka's La voie du salut (1985), and Bassek's La tache de sang (1990) exemplify a first stage of consciousness in which the subaltern woman submits passively to oppressive patriarchal, cultural and religious prescriptions. Ba's Une si longue lettre (1979), Mpoudi Ngolle's Sous La cendre le feu (1990) and Rawiri's Fureurs et cris de femmes (1989) present a more assertive, rebellious heroine whose efforts are undermined by a resilient social context. Finally, Traore's Sidagamie (1998), Kei'ta's Rebelle (1998) and Yaou's Le prix de la revoke (1997) address the possibility of a sustained African women's struggle resulting not only in transient personal and isolated victories but also in an enduring social transformation governed by the ethos of gender equality.

D.Litt. et Phil.
The broad aim of the present study was an exploration of the representation of women in the novels of the Maghreb written in French. Two questions provided obvious and logical starting points: Is the fairly aggressive feminism that is so integral to current Western writing equally evident in the fiction of countries where the position of women is governed by religious conviction? Does the fiction emanating from the pens of male authors differ, in the way it reflects this problem, from the fiction written by women?

"Utopian (Post)Colonies: Rewriting Race and Gender after the Haitian Revolution" examines the works of French women authors writing from just before the first abolition of slavery in the French colonies in 1794 to those writing at the time of the second and final abolition in 1848. These women, each in different and evolving ways, challenged notions of race and gender that excluded French women from political debate and participation and kept Africans and their descendants in subordinated social positions. However, even after Haitian independence, French authors continued to understand the colony as a social and political enterprise to be remodeled and ameliorated rather than abandoned. These authors' rewritings of race and gender thus played a crucial role in a more general French engagement with the idea of the colony-as-utopia.

In 1791, at the very beginning of the Haitian Revolution--which was also the beginning of France's unexpected first postcolonial moment--colonial reform, abolitionism, and women's political participation were all passionately debated issues among French revolutionaries. These debates faded in intensity as the nineteenth century progressed. Slavery, though officially abolished in 1794, was reestablished in 1802. Divorce was again made illegal in 1816. Even in 1848, when all men were granted suffrage and slavery was definitively abolished in the French colonies, women were not given the right to vote. Yet, throughout the early nineteenth century, the notion of the colony-as-utopia continued to offer a space for French women authors to imagine gender equality and women's empowerment through their attempts to alter racial hierarchy.

My first chapter examines the development of abolitionism through theatre in the writings of Olympe de Gouges (1748-1793). At a time when performance was understood to have influential moral implications, de Gouges imagines a utopian colony to be possible through the power of performance to produce moral action. In my second chapter, I analyze how, during the slowly re-emerging abolitionist movements of the 1820s, Sophie Doin (1800-1846) and Marceline Desbordes-Valmore (1786-1859) expose the individual emotional suffering of slaves in an effort to make the violence of enslavement visible. In the process of making this violence visible, Doin's La Famille noire suivie de trois nouvelles blanches et noires (1825-6) and Desbordes-Valmore's Sarah (1821), in contrast with Claire de Duras's Ourika (1823), mobilize respect for motherhood to bolster their abolitionist claims. My third chapter analyzes the colonial novels of Madame Charles Reybaud (1802-1870), a forgotten but once-popular novelist, who uses the idea of the colony to develop a feminist re-definition of marriage involving the emancipation of males from their own categories of enslavement. Influenced by the Saint-Simonian thought of the July Monarchy, Reybaud imagines a utopian colony organized by a feminized French humanitarianism that attempts to separate French racial identity from that of the "Creole" colonizer. My final chapter compares this French desire to yoke utopia to colony with nineteenth-century Haitian attempts to reveal the opposite synergy: the inseparability of the institutions of slavery and colonialism. Haiti's first novel, Stella (1859) by Émeric Bergeaud (1818-1858), opposes racial hierarchy and defends Haitian independence in the face of harsh discrimination from an international community whose economies still depended on colonialism and slavery. In contrast with the previous texts studied in this dissertation, Stella imagines Haiti to have the potential to become a utopian postcolony, a nation freed from the constraints of colonialism in such a way as to serve as a model for a future in which racial hierarchy has no power.

Dissertation

Through the context of the rise of fears of Islamism after several high-profile terrorist attacks in France, this chapter considers the impact of discourses of violence against women in the North African community. After a brief history of the ‘veil affairs’ in France (1989-2003), the chapter focuses on two authors who received significant attention in the audio-visual media: Soraya Nini for her 1993 novel Ils disent que je suis une beurette and Samira Bellil for her 2002 memoir Dans l’enfer des tournantes. These texts, although different in literary genre and scope and published nearly a decade apart, were discussed in parallel terms: as voices of emancipated young women who support French institutions and call for more involvement and protection from state authorities against supposedly violent and barbaric young men. Through these conversations a new iteration of ‘beur literature’ was born, that of the ‘beurette’ (young woman) struggling to declare her independence and freedom from oppressive familial customs.