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Race and Sex Across the French Atlantic: The Color of Black in Literary, Philosophical and Theater Discourse

Race and Sex Across the French Atlantic: The Color of Black in Literary, Philosophical and Theater Discourse

by Frieda Ekotto (Author)

  • New

    Hardcover 2011

    $97.39
Synopsis

Race and Sex across the French Atlantic is a critical reconceptualization of the contributions of France and the French-speaking world to race relations in the continental United States. Radically re-evaluating the work of French and Francophone cultural icons such as Jean Genet, Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon and Dany Laferriere, this book makes use of untapped historical archival records that link these writers to important African-American political activists and intellectuals such as Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin and the Black Panthers, and even to the white American writer Norman Mailer. Which Color is Black? argues that re-evaluating the Franch Atlantic - characterized by Quebec, France, Belgium, the French Caribbean and French-speaking Africa - may fundamentally reshape present transatlantic notions of race and sexuality.

$97.39

Quantity

7 in stock

More Information

Format: Hardcover
 Pages: 136
 Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 16 Jan 2011
ISBN 10: 0739141147
ISBN 13: 9780739141144

Media Reviews
Incisive, provocative, and utterly persuasive, Race and Sex across the French Atlantic carefully traces a complex system of exchange that helped to define modern understandings of race and sex beyond the boundaries of nation. Linking such disparate figures and events as Jean Genet, the Negritude movement, the African American Civil Rights movement, and the 2005 uprisings in the Parisian suburbs, Ekotto argues that race and sex serve different epistemological functions across various temporal and spatial sites of the francophone African diaspora. This important new book brilliantly reframes our thinking about race, sex, postcoloniality, and black subjectivity in startling and unforgettable ways. -- Lynne Huffer, Emory University
Frieda Ekotto in Race and Sex across the French Atlantic, provides an engaging and intertextual critical analysis of the work of Jean Genet highlighting the human themes, realities, inventions, and imaginations that permeate the transatlantic discourse, performance, and the affirmation and dismissal of color, and race. This interdisciplinary tour de force invites readers into the theatre, and also provides a provocative reflection on what color is black, issues that remain fundamental to our humanity even in the age of Obama. Ekotto offers a candid and refreshing philosophical analysis of color, race, and the art of writing and performing color and race. It is a must read for everyone interested in these questions. -- Elias K. Bongmba, Rice University
This splendid essay is an intellectual event as Jean Genet's work and interventions on so called black and race issues have never before been critically inscribed in discursive, political and ethical locations such as the French Atlantic and the North-American African diaspora movements of thought. From Genet, Frieda Ekotto has gained a significant lesson: that to be provocative is the true way of thinking and writing. Acute intelligence, innovation and singularity, and elegance of style do the rest:it is all there in Race and Sex Across the French Atlantic> -- Ralph Heyndels, University of Miami
Frieda Ekotto's book confronts the discourses and performances about race, sexuality and the modern Black subject in the French Atlantic. She reads provocatively Jean Genet's Les Negres and Negritude intellectuals and artists to reconstruct the historical and philosophical framework of the distinctive French/Francophone space that shaped ideas about race, culture and civilization. This well researched and elegantly written book is a major addition to the growing literature on the Atlantic World. It obliges us to pay more attention to its diversity and to the role played by languages and the philosophical and literary traditions they are associated with. Race and Sex across the French Atlantic is bound to reshape the scholarship on both Genet and Atlantic World. -- Mamadou Diouf, Columbia University
This splendid essay is an intellectual event as Jean Genet's work and interventions on so called black and race issues have never before been critically inscribed in discursive, political and ethical locations such as the French Atlantic and the North-American African diaspora movements of thought. From Genet, Frieda Ekotto has gained a significant lesson: that to be provocative is the true way of thinking and writing. Acute intelligence, innovation and singularity, and elegance of style do the rest: it is all there in Race and Sex Across the French Atlantic -- Ralph Heyndels, University of Miami
Ekotto makes a compelling argument for a trans-Atlantic approach, and skillfully illustrates how literary texts in French critique Western philosophy. * Research in African Literatures *
Author Bio
Frieda Ekotto is professor of French and Francophone Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan