Corporeal Archipelagos: Writing the Body in Francophone Oceanian Women’s Literature(After the Empire: The Francophone World and Postcolonial France)

Corporeal Archipelagos: Writing the Body in Francophone Oceanian Women’s Literature offers an examination of contemporary literature from the French-speaking Oceanian region through a focus on four of its most prolific women writers and the ways in which these writers negotiate identity construction through one of the most powerful identity markers in the region: the body. The question of the body – how one is to make meaning through corporeality, how one represents the body, and what role the body plays in identity construction – is not only a question with which feminists and postcolonial theorists have been grappling for nearly a half-century. The body is of integral significance to autochthonous Oceanian societies, whose views of corporeality are not built upon a dualistic mind-body binary that has influenced Western thought since the era of Descartes, but rather on a cosmological, epistemological axis that comprehends the body as intertwined with symbolic, social, and ideological understandings of identity. Beginning with an analysis of the ways in which the Oceanian body has been portrayed and consumed as an exotic object of fascination throughout three centuries of European literature, the book examines the myriad methods by which women writers break away from exotic myths and reappropriate the body as a powerful tool that enables them to confront the question of self-definition in French-speaking Oceania. The authors examined in this book employ culturally, racially, and sexually specific bodies in the creation of an original, confrontational literature that transgresses historically and culturally imposed boundaries, audaciously inserting their voices, the voices of Oceania, into the postcolonial francophone literary scene.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Writing the Body in Oceania Chapter 1: The Instigation and the Perpetuation of the Mythical Oceanian Body Chapter 2: Sexual Violence, Trauma, and the Damaged Oceanian Body Chapter 3: Ecological Bodies: An Ecocritical Lens Chapter 4: Writing Institutionalized Bodies: Breaking out of Confinement Chapter 5: To Speak or not to Speak: Writing the Silent Body Conclusion: Oceanian Literature, or The New Tattoo

About the Author :
Julia L. Frengs is assistant professor of French at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Review :
Julia Frengs’s first monograph goes beyond being just a sum of its respective parts; it is an impressively extensive study of Francophone women’s writing from French Polynesia and New Caledonia, a region that has not received enough attention in academic studies. . . Frengs masterfully analyzes the metaphoric and metonymic connection between the centrality of the female body and the land in this timely and scholarly manuscript. . . . Frengs offers a solid scholarly text that employs feminist, ecocritical, and literary theory and contains a wealth of evidence. It brings a number of valuable additions to the field, representing an exceptionally important scholarly source and essential reading for scholars of Francophone Women’s Literature from French Polynesia and New Caledonia. Corporeal Archipelagos is a profoundly significant and beautifully conceived study of the French-language work of four women from French Polynesia and New Caledonia that combines a thorough knowledge of this literature with a strong theoretical approach. Julia Frengs’s expertise on Oceanian authors Déwé Gorodé, Claudine Jacques, Ari’irau, and Chantal Spitz comes through in an unprecedented examination of the centrality of the body to questions with ecological, historical, national, political, sexual, and social import in an oft-overlooked region of Francophone women’s writing. Anyone interested in Pacific Francophone literature should have this book, as it is a very complete work about the question of the Oceanian body in French speaking literature.