Corporeal Archipelagos: Writing the Body in Francophone Oceanian Women’s Literature offers an examination of contemporary literature from the French-speaking Oceanian region through a focus on four of its most prolific women writers and the ways in which these writers negotiate identity construction through one of the most powerful identity markers in the region: the body. The question of the body – how one is to make meaning through corporeality, how one represents the body, and what role the body plays in identity construction – is not only a question with which feminists and postcolonial theorists have been grappling for nearly a half-century. The body is of integral significance to autochthonous Oceanian societies, whose views of corporeality are not built upon a dualistic mind-body binary that has influenced Western thought since the era of Descartes, but rather on a cosmological, epistemological axis that comprehends the body as intertwined with symbolic, social, and ideological understandings of identity. Beginning with an analysis of the ways in which the Oceanian body has been portrayed and consumed as an exotic object of fascination throughout three centuries of European literature, the book examines the myriad methods by which women writers break away from exotic myths and reappropriate the body as a powerful tool that enables them to confront the question of self-definition in French-speaking Oceania. The authors examined in this book employ culturally, racially, and sexually specific bodies in the creation of an original, confrontational literature that transgresses historically and culturally imposed boundaries, audaciously inserting their voices, the voices of Oceania, into the postcolonial francophone literary scene.

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.

"Francophone Women: Between Visibility and Invisibility underscores the writing of authors who foreground the female body and who write across geographical borders, as part of a global literary movement that has the French language as its common denominator. This edited collection exposes how female authors portray the tensions that exist between visibility and invisibility, public and private, presence and absence, and excess and restraint when it is linked to femininity and the female body." --Book Jacket.

Building on the critical foundations established by Edward Said in Orientalism, Foreign Bodies examines the relationship between the Orientalist tradition in French art and literature and France's colonial history. It focuses on a central dimension of this exchange: the prevalent figure of the "oriental woman," and the interplay of race and gender in both domestic and colonial history. It also offers a genealogy of contemporary French attitudes to Islamic culture, in which beliefs about sexuality and gender relations continue to occupy a privileged place. The author examines the extent to which the rhetorical status and political implications of Orientalism register the changing circumstances of French colonial activity, tracing the convergence, or divergence, of colonial practice and the literary record. She also argues against the tendency, in both historical and theoretical writing on colonialism, to divide center from margins, metropolitan from colonial. Instead, she shows how colonial products and ideas permeated the domestic culture and shaped its evolution. Finally, the book proposes that the feminine figures of Orientalist texts are often interwoven with representations of language, and more specifically with representations of language as an alien and resistant code—something other than the transparent medium of ideas. It suggests that in promoting awareness that language is not simply the neutral medium of thought and experience, these veiled figures of language function as "foreign bodies," creating disruptive effects within an economy orchestrated toward the production of knowledge of the other. However, the book also argues against the view, espoused by certain critics, that the self-reflexivity of Orientalist writing fully counteracts its polarizing political effects, arguing instead for a process of "double reading" that acknowledges both the geopolitical power encoded within Orientalist representation and the ways in which specific texts resist this power.

The literature of French-speaking countries forms a distinct body of work quite separate from literature written in France itself, offering a passionate creative engagement with their postcolonial cultures. This book provides an introduction to the literatures that have emerged in the French-speaking countries and regions of the world in recent decades, illustrating their astonishing breadth and diversity, and exploring their constant state of tension with the literature of France. The study opens with a wide-ranging discussion of the idea of francophonie. Each chapter then provides readers with historical background to a particular region and identifies the key issues that have influenced the emergence of a literature in French, before going on to examine in detail a selection of the major writers. These case studies tackle many of the key authors of the francophone world, as well as authors writing today.

In Bodytalk, E. Jane Burns contends that female protagonists in medieval texts authored by men can be heard to talk back against the stereotyped and codified roles that their fictive anatomy is designed to convey.

Exploring why there is so much fecal matter in literary works that matter Cacaphonies takes fecal matter and its place in literature seriously. Readers and critics have too long overlooked excrement’s vital role in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century French canon. In a stark challenge to the tendency to view this literature through sanitizing abstractions, Annabel L. Kim undertakes close readings of key authors to argue for feces as a figure of radical equality, both a literary object and a reflection on literature itself, without which literary studies is impoverished and sterile. Following the fecal through line in works by Céline, Beckett, Genet, Sartre, Duras, and Gary and the contemporary authors Anne Garréta and Daniel Pennac, Kim shows that shit, far from vanishing from the canon after the early modern period, remains present in the modern and contemporary French literature that follows. She argues that all the shit in the canon expresses a call to democratize literature, making literature for all, just as shit is for (or of) all. She attends to its presence in this prized element of French identity, treating it as a continually uttered desire to manifest the universality France aspires to—as encapsulated by the slogan Liberté, égalité, fraternité—but fails to realize. In shit there is a concrete universalism that traverses bodies with disregard for embodied differences. Cacaphonies reminds us that literature, and the ideas to be found therein, cannot be separated from the corporeal envelopes that create and receive them. In so doing, it reveals the aesthetic, political, and ethical potential of shit and its capacity to transform literature and life.