The Body in Francophone Literature

Historical, Thematic and Aesthetic Perspectives

Much of Francophone literature is a response to an elaborate discourse that served to bolster colonial French notions of national grandeur and to justify expansion of French territories overseas. A form of colonial exoticism saw the colonized subject as a physical, cultural, aesthetic and even sexual singularity. Francophone writers sought to rehabilitate the status of non–Western peoples who, through the use of anthropometric techniques, had been racially classified as inferior or primitive. Drawing on various Francophone texts, this collection of new essays offers a compelling study of the literary body—both corporeal and figurative. Topics include the embodiment of diasporic identity, the body politic in prison writing, women’s bodies, and the body’s expression of trauma inflicted by genocidal violence.