Critical Conditions Illness and Disability in Francophone African and Caribbean Women's Writing
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- Englisch ausgewählt
Fr. 146.00
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Beschreibung
Produktdetails
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Erscheinungsdatum
17.11.2011
Verlag
Globe Pequot Publishing Group IncSeitenzahl
208
Maße (L/B/H)
24/16.2/1.1 cm
Gewicht
476 g
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN
978-0-7391-5114-3
Critical Conditions: Reading Illness and Disability in Francophone African and Caribbean Women s Writing, represents a novel approach not only to postcolonial Francophone literature but to literary and cultural studies in general. Critical Conditions theorizes the unique interplay between history, science, the body, identity and writing that occurs in Francophone women s writing. My analyses attend not only to the aesthetics of the texts, but to culturally-relevant scientific and historical discourses on the body, gender, and race, and to the material conditions which produce and exacerbate illness and disability. Adopting a comparative, interdisciplinary approach to consider the nexus of history, gender, postcoloniality, disability, and writing, the book argues that cultural and literary expressions of illness, suffering, and subjectivity in the postcolonial context are always in dialogue with seemingly external discourses and practices of health. Indeed, the critical conditions of the body as they are conveyed in African and Caribbean women s writing cannot be understood and articulated outside the meanings that surround them.Thus, through sustained analyses of historical, biomedical and socio-cultural currents in the context of eight Francophone novels from 1968-2003, the book advances a new theory of critical conditions. These critical conditions, as I term them, represent the conjunction of bodily, psychic, and textual states that defy conventional definitions of health and wellbeing. The study focuses on Francophone women writers who offer striking commentaries on the experience of illness and/or disability and its attendant socio-cultural, historical, and political discourses: Haitian writer Marie Chauvet, Guadeloupian-Senegalese writer Myriam Warner-Vieyra, Guadeloupian writer Maryse Conde, Senegalese writers Ken Bugul, Fama Diagne Sene and Fatou Diome, and Swiss-Gabonese writer Bessora. The novels are at once intimate explorations of illness, disability, and abjection and critical examinations of these experiences as mutable, constitutive processes to interrogate and to refigure. Their writings, I argue, disclose figures of illness and disability in the postcolonial context that challenge standard paradigms of women s bodily and psychic health established by Western colonial medicine and racial biology such as those that idealize cure, demand normativity, and assign tragedy to the unhealthy.
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