Lexington Books
Pages: 202
Trim: 0 x 0
978-0-7391-1657-9 • Hardback • February 2008 • $114.00 • (£88.00)
978-0-7391-1658-6 • Paperback • September 2008 • $54.99 • (£42.00)
978-0-7391-3201-2 • eBook • February 2008 • $52.00 • (£40.00)
CZcile Accilien is assistant professor of French & Francophone literatures at Columbus State University.
Chapter 1 Preface
Chapter 2 Introduction
Chapter 3 1 Marriage and Gender Politics
Chapter 4 2 Marriage, Sexuality and the Body
Chapter 5 3 Marriage and Motherhood
Chapter 6 4 Marriage, Religion, and Polygyny
Chapter 7 5 Polygyny, AIDS, Sexuality and Status
Chapter 8 6 Marriage, Métissage, and Identity
Chapter 9 7 Women, Marriage and National Identity
Chapter 10 Conclusion: Marriage: A Viable Option
Chapter 11 Bibliography
Offering a detailed and well organized literary analysis of marriage practices in African and Caribbean literatures, Cecile Accilien provides us with a timely and highly informative work on an understudied topic. She successfully demonstrates that Africanand Caribbean societies are indeed a complex interaction and intersection of a multitude of factors shaping the dynamic of conjugal relations. This study will be of immense value to scholars and students of African and Caribbean literatures and cultures....
— Shirin Edwin
In Rethinking Marriage, Cecile Accilien makes an important intervention by addressing a significant trope in Francophone African and Caribbean literature and film that is seldom addressed in a complex, comparative framework. She successfully illustrates the powerful role played by patriarchal institutions that regulate and manipulate the marital union. It is also commendable that she informs her arguments with critical voices from Africa and the Caribbean. Accilien must be commended for a valuable study into the world of gender politics, womanhood, and motherhood. Her intervention provokes further interrogation into the complicated contract of the marital union. Accilien has clearly demonstrated that this terrain needs both exposure and exploration..
— Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw
Cécile Accilien?s Rethinking the Marriage Concept in Francophone African and Caribbean Literatures, is an important work that sheds new light on the marriage convention in diasporic postcolonial francophone literature as well as the discourses on feminist (womanist) scholarship. Her well researched analysis of gender, sexuality, religion, class, métissage, ethnicity and culture in novels and films illustrates the complex ways women define and redefine themselves in traditional and modern contexts, and refashion the socio-cultural matrix that affects marriage and, ultimately, nation building. This book is an impressive study, a refreshing and welcome addition to the scholarship on African diasporic women...
— Régine Latortue