Browsing by Subject "French literature"

“Mapping Manioc” looks in the ground, taking the dense, starchy, and lively materiality of a root tuber as a lens through which to read human relations of domination and reciprocity in the French colonial Caribbean. Borrowing fertile and intersecting methodologies from French and Francophone studies, Africana studies, ecopoetics, decolonial ecologies, food studies, geography, historical anthropology, and history of science, the project divests the vegetal of its connotations of lethargy to frame the manioc root as an active “plant witness” to historical tensions between colonial exploitation and practices of earth-based sustenance. In dialogue with anglophone theorists of the “Plantationocene,” recent criticism from France’s Outre-mer regions contends that present-day extractivist paradigms producing differential vulnerability to environmental harms stem from the racial taxonomies of plantation societies. This dissertation returns to the epochal shifts at the heart of French colonization in the Caribbean to uncover how one plant was harnessed to feed both the plantation’s devaluation of life and thriving configurations of human and nonhuman being beyond its reach.“Mapping Manioc” relies on a reading practice that breaches the surface of colonial archives to excavate the frictions between Indigenous and Afro/descended peoples’ nonextractive relations with a nurturing earth, on the one hand, and the exploitation of manioc’s carbohydrate calories to fuel settler colonialism and chattel slavery, on the other. This corpus attuned to plant liveliness spans a long eighteenth century, and consists of missionary accounts by Raymond Breton, Jean-Baptiste Labat, and others; lay travel narratives such as that of the anonymous mariner of Carpentras; botanical treatises and natural histories by figures like Guillaume Silvestre Delahaye; planters’ manuals, ships’ logbooks, habitation daybooks, and legal ordinances; and visual materials including engravings, watercolors, "plans d’habitation," and cartography. To evoke counterhistorical visions of human freedoms grounded in ecological flourishing, the project interweaves the colonial archive with Caribbean and Black feminist theorizations of geography and subjectivation; with perspectives from anthropology “beyond the human” and sensory ethnobotany; and with Caribbean literary and visual engagements, including novels by Édouard Glissant. Engaging these sources and artifacts, “Mapping Manioc” tracks embodied meetings of skin and starch across colonial Martinique, Guadeloupe, Saint-Domingue, and French Guiana. This approach routes ancestral life through plant life, attending to the patterns of existence of subjects who forged solidarities with nonhuman beings against plantation epistemologies and their devastating afterlives. By illuminating a genealogy of earthy resistance to colonial extractivism and dispossession, the project points to the role of ancestral food plants in resurgence, solidarity, and self-determination in the Outre-mers, foregrounding the contributions of French and Francophone studies to planetary climate justice, Caribbean climate resilience, and climate cuisine movements.

Abstract

This dissertation argues that the literary and cultural history of nineteenth-century Paris must be re-envisaged in the context of fashion as a spatial and embodied practice. While existing scholarship has focused on the role of fashion in emerging consumer culture, I focus instead on how clothing mediated bodily and urban knowledge. With the rise of department stores, the fashion press, and textile innovations in mid-nineteenth-century France, fashion became synonymous with the modern urban experience. Concomitantly with the emergence of the modern fashion system, the city of Paris was itself refashioned through vast urbanization projects. This metropolitan redesign created new points of intersection between the dressed body and the city. I argue that writers during the Second Empire and early Third Republic reframed fashion as a form of embodied space. Balancing close readings of canonical texts, Charles Baudelaire’s “À une passante” and Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, for example, with lesser known works, including Gustave Flaubert’s Le Château des cœurs and Stéphane Mallarmé’s journal La Dernière mode, alongside fashion journals and physical garments themselves, I propose that the fashioned body was inextricably tethered to conceptions of urban space in the nineteenth-century French cultural imaginary.

The interdependent phenomena of piracy, privateering, and slave trading have been endemic to the Mediterranean since antiquity. However, from the mid-sixteenth to the beginning of the eighteenth-century, these phenomena – known at the time as corso – grew exponentially, both in volume and impact. For more than a century, corso played a significant role in influencing the commercial and social exchanges in the Western Mediterranean, affecting the lives of hundreds of thousands of individuals from all over Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Although both Europe and North Africa were deeply involved in corso, its image in early modern European culture became almost exclusively associated with the Muslim World and the North African region – known at the time as “Barbary” – giving shape to one of the “Great Fears” of pre-modern Europe. However, besides the anxiety, misapprehensions, and prejudice, corso’s geographical and cultural proximity also sparked significant intercultural and interreligious interactions. My primary corpus examines a collection of non-fictional and fictional texts, including captivity and redemption narratives, pamphlets, and news reports, as well as Romance epics, Baroque novels, novellas, dramas, and comedies. Through this study, I show how corso’s discursive representation ended up playing a crucial role in shaping European understanding of the Western Mediterranean at the time. My study contributes to enriching the predominant Euro-Ottoman orientation of early modern Mediterranean and Orientalist studies by considering the plurality of early modern Orientalisms.

The Art of Distances or, a Morality for the Everyday shows how British, French and German writers have dramatized the dilemmas of the ethical life with others in the twentieth century, and taken up the challenge of imagining new forms of community. Framed by an encounter between the thought of Theodor Adorno and Roland Barthes, the study traces an exemplary arc from 1933 to 1999, bringing together works of fiction, philosophy, critical theory, autobiography, social reportage and anthropology authored by deeply intriguing or controversial figures such as George Orwell, Paul Morand, Henry Miller, Elias Canetti, Iris Murdoch, Walter Benjamin, Annie Ernaux, Günter Grass, and others. Negotiating the ethical and the political, the role that intellectuals can, or should assume in the conflicts and debates of their time, trying to find adequate forms to express their dilemmas, these writers share a sustained attention to the question of the ideal distance between oneself and others in an age deprived of a shared morality.

This dissertation, The Biopower of the Oldest Mafia: Economics, Biopolitics, and Ecology in Mediterranean Society, tracks the evolution of the Camorra criminal organization through a literary and cinematic study of its representations. I propose that we understand the Camorra not only as a global economic force but also as a modern technology of power that affects biological life of a vast population. Drawing on Fredric Jameson’s work on postmodernism and his notion of pastiche, merged with a biopolitical framework, I deconstruct a genre of popular movies known as “Neapolitan Westerns,” as well as literary texts such as Giuseppe Marrazzo’s Il camorrista (1984), Nanni Balestrini’s Sandokan (2004), and Roberto Saviano’s Gomorra (2006). Through the lens of these cultural products, my work shows how the Camorra created a totalitarian society, based on the ghettoization of migrants from different African countries, notably Nigeria. My research also draws a parallel between the Camorra and the French criminal organization, known as the milieu marseillais, operating in Southern France. Through the analysis of TV shows, movies, and novels, I demonstrate how over the last century the Marseille Mafia has shaped the geopolitics of the Mediterranean by exploiting the strategic position of the port of Marseille. In this way, the Marseille Mafia has exercised a pervasive power over North African migrants and controlled the flow of people and capital from former French colonies. The Biopower of the Oldest Mafia moves away from the long-standing literary, anthropological, and historical paradigm which considers the Camorra, and other Italian Mafias, either as the result of the backwardness of Southern Italian society or as a pathological articulation of the economic system. By using the notion of biopower, I demonstrate that the Camorra is a dynamic social system. I reveal its role as a transnational criminal organization affecting the biological life of millions of people by imposing precise sexual behaviors, regulating race relations, and systematically devastating the Mediterranean habitat in the name of profit. Finally, my analysis of the biopower exercised by the Camorra provides essential clues about the operating procedures of Mafia-like criminal organizations throughout the world.

Dreams of Reason: The Imagination of Alterity in the Long Eighteenth Century historicizes the assumptions underlying theories of fantastic or non-realist genre fiction. In the course of a comparative analysis of the lunar voyage, oriental tale, and Gothic novel, representative fictional texts in English and French from the late seventeenth through the late eighteenth centuries are read along with critical works by their contemporaries. The aim is to show how modern notions of fantastic literature arose not from a rhetorical opposition to realism or verisimilitude, but to historical encounters with alterity, from new cosmological ideas to increased exposure to non-European cultures around the world. This dissertation locates fantastic fiction at the center of the development of a European identity in the early modern period.

This dissertation uses Haitian-Canadian writer Dany Laferrière’s transnational trajectory as a focal point for a study of the relationship between literature, marketing, power, and creative agency. It analyzes Laferrière’s literary career over the span of thirty years (1985-2018), his portrayal in the press and his work’s packaging and reception in the three places the author has been published in the original French language: Quebec, France, and Haiti. Located at the intersection of cultural studies, literary theory, and postcolonial studies, my study explores the ways in which global migration has changed literary production and consumption, and shaped ideas about nationalism. In this analysis, I argue that Laferrière contributed to reshaping national definitions of literature in all three spaces, and that his work’s marketing and reception have revealed political, social, and cultural changes as well as manifestations of identity politics in all three contexts. Through combined analysis of Laferrière’s novels, film adaptations, interviews in the press, book covers, as well as personal interviews that I conducted with his publishers, this study offers a holistic analysis of the cultural, political, and economic dimensions of literary production and circulation in the French-speaking world and contiguous languages like Haitian Creole. Drawing from Laferrière’s packaging in Quebec and France, the study sheds a new light on the way images of Haiti are constructed in the Western imaginary and how paratext mediates discourses about Caribbean writers. Through the study of the writer’s Haitian publication and Creole translation, my work also offers critical insights into the dynamic power of the Haitian book industry, which scholars have largely overlooked. Finally, by tracing the various factors that enabled Laferrière to emerge and paying particular attention to his recent election to the French Academy, this dissertation illuminates the mechanisms of literary consecration as well as his own creative “trickster” strategy to position himself in the global marketplace. Ultimately, I argue that Laferrière’s transnational trajectory offers a unique lens into the interconnected relationships between literature, markets, postcolonial authors, and nationalism.

My dissertation, “Troubles in Representation: (Con)figuring Non-Binary Sex in 19th Century French Literature, Art, and Medicine” argues that to adequately grasp the stakes of sexual non-conformity in 19th c France, we must consider the complex interplay between aesthetics and medicine, where images function as a critical mechanism for contemplating non-binary bodies and identities. I analyze the construction, representation, and conceptual articulation of sex in nineteenth-century France, through the figure of the hermaphrodite and its analogs. Together their disruptive sexual excess and instability exposes the fragility of the framework of dimorphic sex.

The methodology I employ is an interdisciplinary, synthetic approach, integrating extensive archival research into the analysis of a diverse corpus of materials. These objects include medical treatises, novels, short stories, poetry, drawings, paintings, photographs, prints, sculptures, and films—ranging from the canonical to the obscure. My perspective is strongly inflected by the work of Michel Foucault, but places greater emphasis on the image and the materiality of the archive. This enables me to shed light on one of the major blind spots in his theorization of sex, the visible, which for him, was always subordinate to the enunciable. Though Foucault is my primary interlocutor, this project also builds on the work of contemporary scholars in art history, medical humanities, critical theory, and gender studies.

Chapter one investigates the progressive destruction and denial of the category of human hermaphroditism within dominant medico-legal discourse. I connect this phenomenon to the medical community’s paradoxical preoccupation with antiquity’s mythical hermaphrodite. Chapter two traces parallels between the hermaphrodite, the androgyne and the castrato, examining their artistic, literary, and scientific treatment. In particular, I explore specters of antiquity in the work of Balzac, Gautier, Cuisin, and Latouche. Chapter three studies the history of famous “hermaphrodite” Herculine Barbin. Here, I dig deep into the archives to propose an alternate genealogy to Foucault’s volume. Presenting the model of the palimpsest instead, I explore how Barbin’s narrative and identity became subject to a process of rewriting to accommodate different political agendas. Chapter four investigates Barbin’s legacy through a series of 19th-21st c adaptations in a variety of media: novels, poetry, opera, theater, and film. I explain the narrative’s enduring social relevance and what the reinterpretations owe to Foucault’s scholarship.

This dissertation examines ethnographic writing in the Jesuit Relations, a set of annual reports from missionaries in New France to Society of Jesus authorities in France that were published and widely read from 1632 to 1673. Drawing on currents in cultural anthropological thought about the complex relationship between anthropologists, their subjects, and the texts they produce, I analyze how the Relations allowed Jesuit missionaries to define for French readers Amerindian cultures, European-Amerindian interactions, and the health and success of the colony and the mission for forty years, almost without competition, giving them extraordinary influence over perceptions of the Amerindian Other at the very moment that France's interest therein was being piqued by an increasing awareness of the world outside of Europe. The texts now are lauded as the première source of information on the Algonquian and Iroquoian groups with which the Jesuits were in contact in seventeenth century New France. In this dissertation, I examine the ways Jesuits conveyed information about Amerindian groups, focusing on the rhetorical aspects of their accounts that have been largely ignored by social scientists who have mined the texts for data. Instead of considering the Relations as a collection of facts recorded by diligent field workers, I seek to understand them as texts that reflect multiple points of view and the political, religious, and intellectual pressures acting on their French Catholic authors. Were Amerindians human? If so, were they created in Eden along with the ancestors of Europeans? How could one explain their presence in America, with little apparent knowledge of their origins? And if they were human and of the same stock as European Christians, how could one explain the fact that their beliefs and behavior were so different from those of their French Christian interlocutors? These questions, I argue, left an enduring mark on the Jesuits' descriptions of Amerindian cultures, making their texts less the work of proto-anthropologists than a form of intellectual colonization.

This project examines dance scenes in nineteenth-century French novels written by women to consider how grace—beauty in motion—defines women as social, moral, and artistic actors. Creating a constellation of dance scenes, I develop a concept called graceful inclinations, meaning experiences that move observers to contemplate space, time, or bodies differently. I use this concept to study representations of women’s sexuality and subjectivity in dances scenes written by Sophie Cottin, Germaine de Staël, Barbara von Krüdener, Claire de Duras, George Sand, and Marie d’Agoult. Because previous studies of dance in nineteenth-century French literature focus predominately on texts by canonical male authors, scholarship on literary descriptions of dance is limited to a masculine perspective. Moreover, studies of the philosophical and esthetic meanings of grace rarely cite primary sources written by women, although, since the eighteenth century, grace has been closely associated with Western understandings of femininity.This project focuses on four genres of dance: contradances, the waltz, presentational dances (the shawl dance, quadrille, and bolero), and the tarantella. Whereas descriptions of contradances propose ideal social relations or contest the idealization of disembodied femininity, waltz scenes create dystopian depictions of upper-class debauchery and masculine authority. Characters performing presentational dances become archetypal representations of their gender or race. The tarantella in Staël’s novel Corinne, ou l’Italie presents the ultimate dancer who is graceful and sensual. Analyzing representations of exoticism throughout this corpus, I use Srinivas Aravamudan’s theory of Enlightenment Orientalism to consider how exoticized bodies became a testing ground for thinking about female sexuality. I draw upon the theories of Adriana Cavarero, Michel Foucault, Simone de Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray, Genviève Fraisse, and Judith Lynne Hanna to study the sexual politics of dance scenes. In my study of the aesthetic and philosophical concept of grace, dance emerges as an art capable of moving its viewers but not yet capable of instigating social change. Creating both utopian or dystopian moments, dance scenes offer insight into the different worlds that writers wished to create or to avoid.