"Postcolonial Representations: Women, Literature,
Identity" enthusiastically engages with and praises the concept of
hybridity in the literary works of "postcolonial" women writers. The
celebratory analyses of women's texts unveil profound depth and complexity,
shedding light on authors who historically received minimal critical attention.
While this contribution is significant to the field, it may not wield the same
influence as its predecessor. This is partly attributed to the evolving
landscape of the field itself, with "postcolonial" feminist studies
expanding as a distinct area of inquiry. Lionnet's work, once considered
unusually theoretical, no longer stands out in the same way.
Furthermore, the book's status as a collection of
previously published essays, lacking regional, cultural, or thematic unity,
contributes to its diminished impact. This "incoherence" could be
interpreted productively as Lionnet's deliberate refusal to establish a canon
of marginalized women writers. The book comprises an introduction outlining the
author's problematic, followed by eight essays mostly exploring woman-authored
narratives from various nations worldwide.
In the chapter titled "Of Mangoes and Maroons,"
Lionnet focuses on Michelle Cliff's "Abeng," labeling Cliff an "autoethnographer"
dedicated to the "re-creation of a collective identity" rather than
the private self. Lionnet challenges previous interpretations of Cliff as
inauthentically Jamaican, emphasizing the novelist's exploration of maternal
filiation. This realignment connects Cliff genealogically with figures like
Audre Lorde and Zora Neale Hurston, distancing her from male writers who favor
exile as an escape from (neo) colonial confinement.
The subsequent chapter, "Evading the Subject,"
delves into the works of the lesser-known Indo-Mauritian writer Ananda Devi,
complicating stereotypes about African writing and its exclusivity to the
continent or black authors. Lionnet's examination of Rue La Poudrière's
narrative of an urban prostitute in Port-Louis is suggestive but concise.
The following chapters, "A New Antillean
Humanism" and "Inscriptions of Exile," could be interpreted as
examples of the double gesture prevalent in much Francophone Caribbean women's
writing—exile and return. "A New Antillean Humanism" focuses on
Maryse Conde's reimagining of the Caribbean and its need for a complex
politics, drawing on Edouard Glissant's notion of La Relation. The chapter
"Exile" briefly discusses alienation in works by Myriam Warner-Vieyra
and Suzanne Dracius-Pinalie, tracing ambivalent representations of the black
and female body as historical commodity and uncertain contemporary agent on
journeys from the Caribbean to Europe and Africa in the quest for selfhood.
The exploration of Warner-Vieyra's "Juletane"
is revisited at greater length in the context of a broader examination that
includes a short story from "Femmes échouées." These works are
juxtaposed with "Dikeledi," a story from Bessie Head's "A
Collector of Treasures," and Gayl Jones's "Eva's Man" in what
stands out as the most robust essay in the collection. Despite its central
thematic focus on the decidedly uncelebratory topic of female murderers,
"Geographies of Pain" maintains a remarkably unsentimental approach
to the victimization of the women depicted. Lionnet proposes a symptomatic
reading of these characters, using the crimes they commit as a metaphor for
"society's crime against the female individual" (106). By challenging
the traditional portrayal of women as gentle nurturers, she foregrounds the constructed
nature of her project. The relationship among the three black women writers is
not only based on their "shared 'Africanness' but [on] a performative
intertextuality" (108). Lionnet suggests that these works demonstrate a
pattern of influence and cross-fertilization, utilizing themes and addressing
negative mythic images of women in subversive ways.
One of Lionnet's boldest and most ambitious intellectual
and political endeavors in "Postcolonial Representations" is her
engagement with the highly charged topic of female excision. Negotiating
between Eurocentric chauvinism and cultural relativism, she reads both the
historical practice and its literary representation through a feminist lens.
She situates this phenomenon discursively, highlighting its significance to
gender formation, rites of adulthood, and various power relations affecting the
body. The first of the two chapters, "Dissymmetry Embodied," delves
into the topic and proceeds to conduct a close reading of Nawal El Saadawi's "Woman
at Point Zero." While Lionnet compiles an impressive bibliography of
anti-excision writings by African women, she appears to concede too quickly to
the "authenticity charge"—the notion that Westernized women are too
removed from traditional indigenous groups to be politically helpful. In
"The Limits of Universalism," the sole non-literary chapter, Lionnet
revisits similar issues of gender, power, and cultural difference but through
the lens of a court case involving an immigrant Malian family victimized by the
French legal system.
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