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Odious Caribbean Women and the Palpable Aesthetics of Transgression

Gladys M. Francis

Odious Caribbean Women and the Palpable Aesthetics of Transgression examines the methods through which the works of French Caribbean women resist hedonistic conceptions of pleasure, “art for art’s sake” aestheticism, and commodification through representations of “uglified” spaces, transgressive “deglamorified” women’s bodies in pain and explicit corporeal and sexual behaviors. Gladys M. Francis offers an original approach through her reading together of the literary, visual, and performing arts (as well as traditional Caribbean dance, music, and oral practices) to arrive at a transregional (trans-Caribbean and transatlantic), trans-genre (with regard to forms of text), and transdisciplinary conversation in Francophone studies, postcolonial studies, and cultural studies. This interweaving is illustrated through the artistic engagements of artists such as Ina Césaire, Maryse Condé, Sylvaine Dampierre, Fabienne Kanor, Lénablou, Béatrice Mélina, Gisèle Pineau, Simone Schwarz-Bart, and Miriam Warner-Vieyra. How can we investigate, theoretically or critically, the aesthetically unpleasing found in depictions of odious female protagonists or female performers? What is the aesthetic value of transgressional women’s bodies? This book presents novel tools to understand how these women artists mark and re-instate embodied trauma, survival, and resistance into history. It posits that cultural performances can disrupt a culture-as-text ethnocentrism, for, these works provide the means to expose the tangible aesthetics through which the body becomes an archive that bears the psychological, physical and structural suffering. This project also demonstrates the ways through which the corporeal realm offered by these transgressive works (through explicit female perspectives on sex, love, and gender) challenges our moral sensibilities, works to sabotage the voyeuristic gaze, and stimulates a new methodology for reading the women’s body. It focuses on the complex layers of identity formation and bodily representations with respect to issues of sex, consumerism, commodification, violence, gender and women studies, and ethics and moral issues.

Lexington Books

Pages: 190 • Trim: 6¼ x 9½

978-1-4985-4350-7 • Hardback • June 2017 • $117.00 • (£90.00)

978-1-4985-4351-4 • eBook • June 2017 • $111.00 • (£85.00)

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

Odious Caribbean Women and the Palpable Aesthetics of Transgression

Hardback

eBook

Summary

Odious Caribbean Women and the Palpable Aesthetics of Transgression examines the methods through which the works of French Caribbean women resist hedonistic conceptions of pleasure, “art for art’s sake” aestheticism, and commodification through representations of “uglified” spaces, transgressive “deglamorified” women’s bodies in pain and explicit corporeal and sexual behaviors. Gladys M. Francis offers an original approach through her reading together of the literary, visual, and performing arts (as well as traditional Caribbean dance, music, and oral practices) to arrive at a transregional (trans-Caribbean and transatlantic), trans-genre (with regard to forms of text), and transdisciplinary conversation in Francophone studies, postcolonial studies, and cultural studies. This interweaving is illustrated through the artistic engagements of artists such as Ina Césaire, Maryse Condé, Sylvaine Dampierre, Fabienne Kanor, Lénablou, Béatrice Mélina, Gisèle Pineau, Simone Schwarz-Bart, and Miriam Warner-Vieyra. How can we investigate, theoretically or critically, the aesthetically unpleasing found in depictions of odious female protagonists or female performers? What is the aesthetic value of transgressional women’s bodies? This book presents novel tools to understand how these women artists mark and re-instate embodied trauma, survival, and resistance into history. It posits that cultural performances can disrupt a culture-as-text ethnocentrism, for, these works provide the means to expose the tangible aesthetics through which the body becomes an archive that bears the psychological, physical and structural suffering. This project also demonstrates the ways through which the corporeal realm offered by these transgressive works (through explicit female perspectives on sex, love, and gender) challenges our moral sensibilities, works to sabotage the voyeuristic gaze, and stimulates a new methodology for reading the women’s body. It focuses on the complex layers of identity formation and bodily representations with respect to issues of sex, consumerism, commodification, violence, gender and women studies, and ethics and moral issues.

Details

Lexington Books

Pages: 190 • Trim: 6¼ x 9½

978-1-4985-4350-7 • Hardback • June 2017 • $117.00 • (£90.00)

978-1-4985-4351-4 • eBook • June 2017 • $111.00 • (£85.00)

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

Author

Gladys M. Francis is assistant professor of French and Francophone studies at Georgia State University.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Chapter 1 - Cultural Politics, Ekphrases Writing of Resistance, and Sensorial Aesthetics
Chapter 2 - Meaning Making of Embodied Performatic Repertoire
Chapter 3 - Aesthetics of Pain: Embodied Poetics of negation
Chapter 4 - Transgression in Pleasure, Desire, and Gender
Conclusion

Reviews

Gladys M. Francis’s Odious Caribbean Women and the Palpable Aesthetics of Transgression is a fascinating, pioneering study. Applying her theory of ‘corpomemorial tracing,’ she analyzes texts by literary, visual, and performance artists–novelists, playwrights, poets, filmmakers, painters, and dancers–, demonstrating her expertise and contributing new insight into several disciplines. This excellent, interdisciplinary work is essential reading for scholars of the French Caribbean, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Body Studies.
— Renée Larrier, Rutgers University

To scholars and students interested in alternative processes of memory, history, and identity within the Caribbean, this new work will be a fruitful resource. It contributes important tools and perspectives for exploring visual arts and writing as extensions of the body that performs memory in tandem with, but in many ways in contrast to, the official archive. It thus furthers our possibilities for relating with complex, ongoing negotiations of Caribbean female identities.
— Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature

Odious Caribbean Women and the Palpable Aesthetics of Transgression

Gladys M. Francis

Odious Caribbean Women and the Palpable Aesthetics of Transgression

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