Women, Theory, Praxis, and Performativities - (Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures) by Jacqueline Couti & Anny-Dominique Curtius

Book Synopsis

An Open Access edition of this book will be 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.

Review Quotes

"A particular strength of this book is its interdisciplinarity: it makes a valuable contribution to various disciplines, including French and Francophone Studies, Environmental Humanities, Medical Humanities, Women's Studies, Gender Studies and Memory Studies. The book will be valuable to scholars working in these fields." - Dr Sheela Mahadevan, University of Liverpool

"One of the many strengths of [this book] is its transoceanic conceptual framework which draws connections within and beyond the three oceanic spaces. [It] makes an important contribution to several fields, including critical ocean studies, Francophone Caribbean and Pacific studies, and gender and sexuality studies. The interdisciplinary approach, the diversity of time periods studied, and the range of methods employed by the contributors are further strengths of the [book]." - Dr Antonia Wimbush, University of Melbourne