Transversal Alliances: White Fantasies of Indigeneity in Suzanne Desrochers’s Bride of New France (original) (raw)
2013, Canada and Beyond: A Journal of Canadian Literary and Cultural Studies
Suzanne Desrochers' novel Bride of New France (2011) constructs interesting historical transnationalities linking the French biopolitics of population implemented by Louis XIV, with the story of filles du roi and encounters with indegeneity in colonial New France. Although her narrative explores the possibility of illicit transversal alliances between the oppressed, in this case involving a poor white French woman and an indigenous man, I argue that its potential to reconfigure gendered and racialized spaces of the Empire is thwarted by its generic indebtedness to the genre of the colonial gothic, preoccupied with the "hauntings" of colonialism and imperialism. Moreover, Desrochers' hybrid text, a product of "miscegenation" between history and literature, relies on Eurocentric stereotypes of the Noble Savage and the bad Indian, which suggests that perhaps even her ostensibly feminist attempt to re-read the imperial moment through the stock repertoire of g...
Sign up for access to the world's latest research.
checkGet notified about relevant papers
checkSave papers to use in your research
checkJoin the discussion with peers
checkTrack your impact
Related papers
Rethinking French Insularities: Marie NDiaye's "Rosie Carpe" (RAL_Vol.51.2. Indiana UP)
Research in African Literatures, 2020
Marie NDiaye’s writing occupies a unique position in literary French and Francophone postcolonial time and space. as shown, many biographical elements that are specific to the author’s history reemerge through fictional figures and situations located at the crossroads of sub-Saharan African, metropolitan, and French overseas memories. They are traumatic as well as post-traumatic memories inscribed in the colonial past of France. In this article dedicated to her novel Rosie Carpe, published in 2001 at the dawn of a new century, I contend that these traumatic and post-traumatic experiences and memories have survived the historical process of decolonization and taken the shape of a reality that I explain through the notion of “identity insularities.” These identities are colonial tropes that have persisted in the postcolonial era that is ours. These imaginaries form as many identity islands keeping women and men remote from any form of autonomy. They remain, as unveiled in this novel, under the aegis of a cultural unconscious, of practices of domination and ostracization that have framed a socioeconomic reality of which men of color and women are captives. as uncovered through outbreaks of violence experienced by diverse characters in this novel, the women and men of the postcolonial era depicted by NDiaye are relinquished to the statuses of objects that can be controlled and broken, i.e., mastered. as displayed in this fiction, this centuries-old experience of domination has penetrated psyches, imaginaries, bodies, and territories spanning from metropolitan Ile-de-France to the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe.
2015
When we think of the literature produced before, during, and after the two World Wars we rarely think of the Caribbean as a site of significant literary output. Typically, we privilege a white, male, European literary voice. If we do consider literature from elsewhere, it usually follows a pattern of normative privilege. Therefore, it is useful to consider the female Caribbean voice and its response to colonialism, racism, and gender violence during the period between 1914 and 1945. Claire-Solange, âme-africaine offers arguably one of the best examples of a female Caribbean perspective on World War I as well as global politics. Although Suzanne Lacascade's novel has been obscured and lost over time, the Martinican author portrays everyday scenarios in France during World War I to empower marginalized Caribbean women during one of the most tumultuous moments in the early 20 th Century. While Lacascade shifts our lens to the First World War, Mayotte Capécia's Je suis Martiniquaise is set, in part, during the blockade years in Martinique during World War II under Admiral Georges Robert. Together, these two Martinican female writers-even though they are less well known than their canonical male compatriots Aimé Césaire, Édouard Glissant, and Patrick Chamoiseau-lucidly portray the everyday lives of mulatto women in Martinique and in France as they negotiate their place on the periphery of French society. I argue below that through their interrogations of the everyday during these two wars that Lacascade and Capécia generate female protagonists who challenge racial, cultural, gender, and sexual stereotypes, which have historically rendered mixed race women as marginalized figures in Francophone Caribbean literature.
2012
In memory of Gloria, Luddy, Dorcas and Harry I would like to thank my supervisor, Professor Jennifer Birkett, for her patience, encouragement, and good advice when these were sorely needed; and also Dr Conrad James, who helped to ease me into French West Indian writing at the beginning of my studies, and who supervised my research in Jennifer's absence. I am grateful to my dear parents, who kept faith with me over several years, and gave me the time and space to pursue this piece of scholarship.
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.