Body performative and agency in contemporary novels and theater in French\postcolonial Afro -Caribbean and French encounters

Sulagna Mishra, Purdue University

Abstract

This dissertation examines the construction of the body as a performative agent in contemporary novels and theater from the Afro-Caribbean diaspora and France. This study focuses on the trope of the body performative, in the following novels and plays written and performed in the last thirty years by authors of the Francophone or French diaspora: Marguerite Duras’s L’amant (1984) Ken Bugul’s Le baobab fou (1982), Gisèle Pineau’s L’espérance macadam (1995), and Chair Piment (2002), Calixthe Beyala’s Amours sauvages (1999) and Femme nue, femme noire (2003), Michel Houellebecq’s Plateforme (2001), Bernard-Marie Koltès’s La nuit juste avant les forêts, (1977), and Sony Labou Tansi’s La parenthèse de sang (1981). The thesis includes both French and Francophone plays and novels, thereby revealing how metropolitan “center” and ex-colonial “periphery” are inextricably intertwined. In spite of their geographical and historical differences, the seven writers I study identify the body as the primary locus of historical woundings of continuing global, neo-colonialist economic forces. They investigate the limits of the body subjected to physical violence and trauma such as torture, rape, imprisonment and physical depravation. Yet these writers, by questioning the limits of the body as it is traditionally understood in terms of ethnicity, sex, and gender, in their texts effect resistance and give the body performative its agency. Chapter 1 “Questions in Theory” is about the theoretical underpinnings of this dissertation. Within the larger framework of intertextuality, Chapters 2 and 3 study the critical insights of Pineau, Bugul, and Beyala into post/colonial theories of resistance such as Negritude, Antillanité, and Créolité in their novels. Chapter 4 reads the city of Paris as postcolonial spatial practices of the body within specific historical contexts in Beyala, Duras, Houellebecq, Koltès, and Pineau. Each text interrogates national, gendered, sexed, and racial identity underpinned by the uneven global socio-political and economic shifts from industrial to postindustrial capitalism. Finally, Chapter 5 is about the discursive intersections of theater as a post/colonial representational construct, nationalism, and embodiment in Sony.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Broden, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Modern literature|Romance literature|African literature|Caribbean literature|Theater

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