Of Suffocated Hearts and Tortured Souls: Seeking Subjecthood Through Madness in Francophone Women's Writing of Africa and the CaribbeanLexington Books, 2003 - 197 pages Female characters who suffer madness and insanity are strikingly prominent in novels by women writers of Africa and the Caribbean. To find out why there are so many 'suffocated hearts and tortured souls' in this literature, Valerie Orlando, who has long studied Francophone text and culture, here closely reads the work of Aminata Sow Fall, Mariama B%, Myrian Warner-Vieyra, and Simone Schwarz-Bart, among others. In these women's novels, Orlando finds, madness is the manifestation of a split identity, and in this study she sets herself the task of interrogating the nature of that identity. Francophone women novelists of Africa and the Caribbean--though they come from countries whose unique experiences of colonialism, revolution, and postcolonial regimes have shaped specific and discrete cultures--express a common search for a meaningful relationship between their experience as women to the history and destiny of their nations. Only when 'woman'' is understood not as an ahistorical object but as a subject whose lived body is entwined with political, cultural, and economic structures, Orlando argues, will insanity finally give way to clarity of being. Interweaving literary citations with theoretical discussion, Suffocated Hearts and Tortured Souls is just as much a masterful explication of profoundly affecting literary work as it is an essential addition to feminist scholarship and theory. |
Contents
Mediating Identity in Foreign Spaces | 22 |
Reconciliation Feminine Utopias | 23 |
Introduction to State I | 33 |
Copyright | |
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African Algerian women alienation Aminata Sow Fall Amour Anna-Claude Assia Djebar Bâ's becomes Beur Beyala body Bouraoui Cajou Calédu Caribbean Chant écarlate Chauvet Claire Claire-Solange Claire's Colère colonial cultural defines diaspora Douceurs Duvalier exile Fanon father feels Félix Guattari female feminine femme Fikria Folie foreign France Francophone Women Frantz Fanon French gender Gilles Deleuze Grotte éclatée Guadeloupe Guadeloupian Haiti Haitian Hélène heroine heroine's Houari Hucquart identity ideology insanity Jean Luze Juletane Juletane's Lacascade Lacascade's novel Lacrosil Leïla literary Literature lives madness Maghreb marginalization Mariama Mariama Bâ Marie Chauvet Martinique Maryse Condé masculine Mechakra mental Mireille mulatto multicultural Négritude nomadic novelists Ousmane Paris Pluie et vent political postcolonial protagonist race racial Schwarz-Bart Senegal Senegalese sexual skin color social society sociocultural Sow Fall space story Tanga Télumée traditional University Press violence voice Voyeuse Warner-Vieyra woman women authors Women Writers writing young Zeida