Critical Conditions

Illness and Disability in Francophone African and Caribbean Women’s Writing

Julie Nack Ngue

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. Julie Nack Ngue’s 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 that produce and exacerbate illness and disability. Adopting a comparative, interdisciplinary approach, Nack Ngue 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. Thus, through sustained analyses of historical, biomedical and sociocultural currents in the context of eight Francophone novels from 1968 to 2003, the book advances a new theory of “critical conditions.” These critical conditions represent the conjunction of bodily, psychic, and textual states that defy conventional definitions of health and well-being.
The study focuses on Francophone women writers who offer striking commentaries on the experience of illness and/or disability and its attendant discourses: Haitian writer Marie Chauvet; Guadeloupian-Senegalese writer Myriam Warner-Vieyra; Guadeloupian writer Maryse Condé; Senegalese writers Ken Bugul, Fama Diagne Sène, and Fatou Diome; and Swiss-Gabonese writer Bessora. These women’s writings 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.”

Lexington Books

Pages: 208 • Trim: 6⅜ x 9½

978-0-7391-5114-3 • Hardback • November 2011 • $114.00 • (£88.00)

Subjects: Literary Criticism / Women Authors, Literary Criticism / Caribbean & Latin American, Literary Criticism / European / French

Critical Conditions

Illness and Disability in Francophone African and Caribbean Women’s Writing

Hardback

Summary

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. Julie Nack Ngue’s 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 that produce and exacerbate illness and disability. Adopting a comparative, interdisciplinary approach, Nack Ngue 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. Thus, through sustained analyses of historical, biomedical and sociocultural currents in the context of eight Francophone novels from 1968 to 2003, the book advances a new theory of “critical conditions.” These critical conditions represent the conjunction of bodily, psychic, and textual states that defy conventional definitions of health and well-being.
The study focuses on Francophone women writers who offer striking commentaries on the experience of illness and/or disability and its attendant discourses: Haitian writer Marie Chauvet; Guadeloupian-Senegalese writer Myriam Warner-Vieyra; Guadeloupian writer Maryse Condé; Senegalese writers Ken Bugul, Fama Diagne Sène, and Fatou Diome; and Swiss-Gabonese writer Bessora. These women’s writings 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.”

Details

Lexington Books

Pages: 208 • Trim: 6⅜ x 9½

978-0-7391-5114-3 • Hardback • November 2011 • $114.00 • (£88.00)

Subjects: Literary Criticism / Women Authors, Literary Criticism / Caribbean & Latin American, Literary Criticism / European / French

Author

Julie Nack Ngue is assistant professor of French (teaching) at the University of Southern California. She is a contributor to journals such as Wagadu: Journal of Transnational Women’s and Gender Studies and to the book collection Emergent Perspectives on Ken Bugul: From Alternative Choices to Oppositional Practices (Jeanne-Sarah de Larquier and Ada Uzoamaka Azodo, eds, 2009).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Chapter 1: “Staring Back”: Visible Difference, Staring, and Uncertain Legibility in Marie Chauvet’s Amour and Myriam Warner-Vieyra’s Juletane
Chapter 2: The Body Composite: Testimony and the Problematic of Integral Healing in Maryse Condé’s Heremakhonon and Ken Bugul’s Le Baobab fou
Chapter 3: Towards a New Aesthetic of the Global: Grotesque Bodies, Circulation, and Haunting in Fama Diagne Sène’s Le Chant des ténèbres and Ken Bugul’s La Folie et la Mort
Chapter 4: Against Quarantine: Foreign Bodies in Excess in Fatou Diome’s Le Ventre de l’Atlantique and Bessora’s 53 cm
Epilogue: In Guise of a Conclusion

Reviews

Nack Ngue’s study of eight novels by Francophone women, spanning 1968–2003, enriches both postcolonial and disability studies by effectively challenging a number of theoretical, geographical, and phenomenological divides. . . .Brilliantly paired novels and a rich progression of analyses scaffold broad scope without undermining depth. . . .Themethodology and structure of Critical Conditions reckon with deeply ingrained hierarchies and patterns of exclusion—historical, linguistic, and theoretical—in order to imagine solidarity between apparently disparate subjects and to reach for a transnational feminist disability politics.
— French Review

With Nack Ngue’s book, disability studies makes a belated entry into Francophone postcolonial feminist studies. This productive angle of approach, coupled with Nack Ngue’s knowledge of African cultural practices, allow her to provide new and sophisticated insights on classic and more recent texts by African and Caribbean women writers. Each chapter probes select texts through the lens of theorized concepts such as the stare, the impossible cure, the grotesque body, and the foreign body. This book makes a significant contribution to the fields of disability, Francophone, and feminist studies.
— Anne Donadey, professor of French and women's studies, San Diego State University

Critical Conditions: Illness and Disability in Francophone African and Caribbean Women’s Writing is a remarkable new development in interdisciplinary studies. It represents a welcome and much-needed investigation that imports the preoccupations of disability studies into the postcolonial and applies postcolonial methodologies in disability studies. In the process, and this is where this book is most exciting, it carves out in inaugural fashion the significant zone of commonalities between these two seemingly disparate fields.
— Lydie Moudileno, professor of French and Francophone studies, University of Pennsylvania