The Body in Francophone Literature: Historical, Thematic and Aesthetic Perspectives

Drawing on varied Francophone texts, the scholars brought together in this volume offer a compelling study, which puts the body and its relationship to its ecologies at the forefront. The notion of body itself points to numerous perspectives across disciplines, including in Literature and the Arts. The body is not only the representation of the self through characters and their interactions; it also reveals a range of postures, marks, techniques, and abilities that shape a narrative. The fictionalization of the body offered by colonial exoticism enforced the perception of the colonized subject in his physical, cultural, aesthetic or even sexual singularity. The emergence of francophone literature has been presented as a response to this European representation of human embodiment, a discourse (counter discourse), which expresses the figure of alterity through the text, as in the Body of the Peul drawing from Cheikh H. Kane's L'aventure Ambigue. Looking back at the Rwandan genocide, the volume contains a seminal essay that examines how the body bears and expresses the specific nature of the trauma inflicted by genocidal violence. It also encompasses other groundbreaking works including an analysis of the body politic in prison writing.