Introduction to the Nottingham French Studies special issue Women and Activism in the Francophone World.

This article examines filmmaker, author, and activist Amandine Gay's autotheoretical essay Une poupée en chocolat (2021). In this rageful text, Gay critiques the politics and violence of transracial adoption. Drawing from her own experience as a transracial adoptee, Gay challenges dominant narratives around kinship and expresses her refusal to conform to traditional family-making or biological motherhood. Her work is a form of activism in process, reclaiming agency amid systemic racism, institutional neglect, and personal crisis. She speaks of the three central pillars of her life – creation, activism, and research – through which she processes and contests these violences. This article focuses on the reparative function of anger and its potential as a generative force within engaged activism. It explores how anger, often pathologized as excessive, is refigured by Gay as a vital resource for challenging institutions that systematically disempower marginalized subjects.

In this article, I analyze how two French female writers, Virginie Despentes ( Baise-Moi) and Marcia Burnier ( Les Orageuses), subvert the topos of rape and revenge by taking it out of the frame of pointless violence and hypersexualization of women to make it more universal and political. By embracing the codes of the genre in order to better transgress them, these writers are reinventing the genre. By showing how the female body can become a subject of desire and an actor of violence rather than an object of desire or a victim of violence, the two authors offer a more in-depth reflection on what rape and revenge are, and reveal in their novels the importance of friendship, sisterhood and mutual assistance between women to rebuild and reconnect with themselves after sexual assault.

This article is an analysis of the 2011 French comedy, Case départ, in which two contemporary black Frenchmen are sent back in time to the eighteenth-century Caribbean and endure slavery and captivity. The film is placed in the contexts (amnesic and controversial) of the historical and public memory of the French Atlantic slave trade, of the (paucity of) its cinematic representation(s), and of the cultural production of French comedy, particularly in relation to ethnic minorities. After an examination of the film’s reception in the Caribbean, the textual dimension is explored in relation to humour and the communities of laughter the film summons in relation to national identity, and to the time travel genre, via Freud, and Homi Bhabha.

Maryse Condé’s Histoire de la femme cannibale (2003) narrates the Black artist Rosélie’s attempt to uncover the truth about her white partner Stephen’s death in South Africa, and hence understand their histoire together and reach a greater degree of creative autonomy. In spite of the trauma it describes, the novel is often playful and ironic in its treatment of racism, creativity and sexual relations. This has led some readers to emphasize above all else Condé’s postmodern resistance to being pigeonholed by race or, as a Caribbean author, to represent Negritude, for example. Nevertheless, alongside, or perhaps by virtue of, its subtle exploration of degrees of everyday hypocrisy and complex historical sensitivities, the novel helps readers to ‘lean in’ to experiences which may be far detached from their own, just as Rosélie empathizes with a woman accused of cannibalism.

Since 2016, Joseph Andras has published a suite of lyrically dense, formally meticulous, literary-political experiments. In his Au loin le ciel du sud (2021), he focuses on Hô Chi Minh, a man who lived long enough to become a chief of state, having thwarted first the French and then the United States. This article argues that by using Hô Chi Minh as its guiding star, Au loin le ciel du sud takes its readers on a ‘left melancholic’ tour of Paris, one whose particular epistemological posture stirs to life sedimented layers of radical social history at each stop, and in doing so, begins to cultivate a reading subject who in turn becomes their living repository. As I will demonstrate, the formal strategies that enable such a literary project rise into focus when compared with another generic tradition, the post-1968 variant of the French detective novel, the néo-polar. In the terms considered by this special issue, the formal resemblance between Au loin le ciel du sud and the néo-polar links Andras’s book to a longer literary tradition of social critique, and the history of the ‘social novel’ more generally.

In this article, we examine the construction of subjectivity amid social violence in Emmelie Prophète's Les Villages de Dieu (2020) and Jean D’Amérique's Soleil à coudre (2021). We ask, specifically, how the novels frame the abject violence of life in contemporary Haiti through the social awakening of two young Haitian protagonists: Célia Jérôme and Tête Fêlée. The events and images they relay are at times visceral in their violence. Theorists from Susan Sontag to Saidiya Hartman engage with the ethics, affect, and effect of representing violence and the in/capacities of empathy. Both Prophète's and D’Amérique's novels incorporate metatextual elements, expanding the generic mode of the social novel to meditate on globalizing means of communication. Les Villages de Dieu approaches the social media-driven obsession with violence-laden images, and considers the powers and pitfalls of the hyper circulation of spectacle. Soleil à coudre sits at the intersection of verse and prose, incorporating epistolary fragments that disrupt the stream of violent scenes of life in 21st century Port-au-Prince.

In her novels, the comtesse de Ségur (1799–1874) often decried the harmful effects of punitive violence against little girls, although she also advocated its merits. As a pedagogical principle and an instrument of oppression, the use of force against female characters affects all social relations in the economy of her novels, from routine educational violence to physical assault. A sequential analysis of these phenomena will show how violence evolves in time and space through two corpuses of texts: the first three novels, or ‘Fleurville trilogy’ and the pair formed by the last two novels, Diloy le chemineau and Après la pluie le beau temps. We will also see how, in these narratives, the family as an institution, through its custodians, parents and surrogates, imposes on little girls a subtext of epistemic violence, embedded in the practice of ‘silencing’ the child victim.