The Body in Francophone Literature

<p> 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.</p><p> 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.</p>