Full Description
An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library.
Women, Theory, Praxis, and Performativities: Transoceanic Entanglements in Francophone Settings bridges the gap between the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. It collectively fosters new transoceanic modes of thinking to reframe postcolonial debates and reveal the interconnected dialogues led by women from former French colonies and post-contact island territories. Thus, the volume unsettles the male agenda (captains, missionaries, mariners, ethnographers), and pays attention to the ways in which artists, writers, and activists have theorized or poetized women and the seas, reclaimed agency and created transformative possibilities. To critically map out a gendered conversation with the ocean, the contributors explore activisms and feminisms, intersectional praxes of care, ecological and health impacts of nuclear radiation and chlordecone contamination, queerness, decolonizing dance, the unsettling of official archives and female tidalectical corporeality and embodiments, Mā'ohi epistemologies and ontologies, silence as empowerment against colonial violence, forced migration and vulnerability.
The volume's overarching approach belongs to a "politics of refusal" which brings forth formerly discarded archives and discredited sites of knowledge to counter ideologies and doctrinal apparatus that promote forgetting or erasure among non-sovereign populations.
In exploring transoceanic feminine spaces as vital sites of knowledge production, this interdisciplinary collaboration aims to ensure that readers actively engage with feminine praxes, understanding their significance not only as theoretical constructs but as lived experiences (re)occupying, (re)appropriating and transcending patriarchal and postcolonial spaces.
Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Figures
Introduction: Transoceanic Feminine Spaces and Sites of Knowledge by Jacqueline Couti and Anny-Dominique Curtius
Part I: Transoceanic Performativities: Activism, Women's Movements, and Feminisms
Chapter 1: "Il y va de l'avenir du pays et du salut de nos enfants": Women's Activism within the Guadeloupean Worker's Movement (1891-1905) by Timothée Valentin, trans. S.C. Kaplan
Chapter 2: Unsettling Feminist Praxis with Martinican Communist Women's Transoceanic Counternarratives: Jane Léro and Solange-Fitte Duval in the 1940s by Jacqueline Couti
Chapter 3: Tahitian Perspectives on Female Spaces: Interconnected Interviews with Titaua Peu and Chantal Spitz by Charlotte Joublot-Ferré, trans. S.C. Kaplan
Part II: Praxes of Care and Practices of Refusal
Chapter 4: Domestication and Emancipatory Praxis of the "Daughters of Heva" in Réunion by Valérie Magdelaine-Andrianjafitrimo, trans. S.C. Kaplan
Chapter 5: Transoceanic Cancerous Breasts: Shaping Care as Praxis of Resistance through the Visibility of Vulnerability by Jennifer Boum Make
Chapter 6: Postpartum Psychosis and the Transoceanic Decolonial Praxis of Radical Self-Care in Moi l'interdite and Le Livre d'Emma by Linsey Sainte-Claire, trans. S.C. Kaplan
Chapter 7: "Wave Song": Radiation Ecologies and Women's Transpacific Poetics by Marlo Starr
Part III: Archipelagic Entanglements: Embodied Performance and Disruptive Body Grammar in Transoceanic Contexts
Chapter 8: Francophone Trans of Color Critique Is an Archipelago: Black Caribbean, Indian Ocean, and Pacific Islands Crosscurrents of Contemporary Gender Theory by Eric J. Disbro
Chapter 9: Embodying and Stretching Identities through Dance: An Interview with Kettly Noël by Hadley Galbraith, trans. S.C. Kaplan
Chapter 10: Tidalectical Bodies: Reclaiming Skeletons, Liana‾Hips, and Feet with Nathalie Hermine, Suzanne Césaire, and Kamau Brathwaite by Anny-Dominique Curtius
Part IV: The Power of the Pen: Unsettling Exotic Archives via Literary Praxis and Rejecting Dehumanization via Literary Praxis
Chapter 11: Chantal T. Spitz and Flora Aurima Devatine: Mā'ohi Decolonial Praxis by Julia L. Frengs
Chapter 12: Voice and Silence in the Work of Kanak Writer Isa Qala by Katherine Hammitt
Chapter 13: Ananda Devi's Poethics of Accountability in Ceux du large by Franck H. Andrianarivo and Mike Lehman
Coda: The Yole and the Hōkūle'a by Jacqueline Couti and Anny-Dominique Curtius
Bibliography
Contributor Bios
