Between Image and Identity. Transnational Fantasy, Symbolic Violence, and Feminist Misrecognition by Karina Eileraas (review)

Book Reviews1 6 1 langue sans se rendre compte qu'elles secondent ainsi ce qu'elles entendent détruire. Que de femmes auteurs, d'écrivains femmes, etc ! Femmes et livres est un must pour celles et ceux qui s'interrogent sur le genre et l'écriture, le genre et les livres dans tous les domaines du savoir. Thérèse Moreau Eileraas, Karina. Between Image and Identity. Transnational Fantasy, Symbolic Violence, and Feminist Misrecognition. United Kingdom: Lexington books, 2007. Pp 175. ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-1812-2. Working with Mohanty's critiques of Western feminist representations of third world women and their often ethnocentric reductionism, Karine Eileraas explores how post-colonial women writers from the Maghreb and South East Asia challenge and subvert the process of objedification, always present in colonial discourse. To that end, the author chose to work from and with semiautobiographical literature, as well as visual and performance art. The works studied include Seila Sebbar, Assia Djebar and Theresa Cha, but also Duras and Wang among others, all transnational subjectivities occupying the borderlands in between nations due to war and colonization. Eileraas, engaging with a plethora of postcolonial critiques such as Fanon and Deleuze as well as Rey Chow and Chandra Mohanty, demonstrates and analyzes new visions of transnational trauma through questioning, in particular, the authorship of an image. The whole analysis promotes a paradigmatic shift in the formulation of difference, agency and representation, suggesting how one might exist in critical relationship to the Orientalist depictions. The book is mainly divided into four chapters, themselves divided in smaller sections, which make this dense demonstration enjoyable reading. Chapter one constitutes several brief encounters with Fanon, Barthes, Lacan and Chow, presenting key theoretical concepts that frame Eileraas's theory interweaving image, identity andfantasy. She then applies her analysis to works by Marguerite Duras and David Henry Wang. This chapter supplements the introduction in setting the theoretical scene for the forthcoming analyses developed in the following chapters. Chapter two makes a thought-provoking parallel between Algerian women, forcedly unveiled to produce identity card in colonized Algeria, and Sherazade, Sebbar's heroin of the novel bearing the same name. Based on a remake of an earlier article, the chapter develops the idea of how subaltern women's oppositional looks or demeanor resist the colonizing gaze, and thus permit the creation of a counter-fiction of female sexuality and national identity, contesting the colonial fantasies of otherness. Chapter three examines further how images in Cha's Dictée (1982) and Chronology (1977) and in Cixous's essay Rootprint (1997) create an (illusory) effect of self identity as a response to the nationalist and colonialist politics of 1 62Women in French Studies representation. The family albums, present in both works, are full of omissions, ruptures and repetitions reflecting the profound suspicion of origins and illustrating the Lacanian concept of "méconnaissance" or misrecognition. This chapter also gives us a chance to revisit the extraordinary work of the belated Cha, whose linguistic experiments and double-entendre symbolize an ex-and a(p)-propriation ofthe French colonial tongue. Chapter four is devoted to Assia Djebar, whose characters subvert the colonizing gaze by using their own fantasies in creating counter-memories of Algerian history and female sexuality in order "to dismember" the very conditions of possibility of this gaze. This feminist symbolic economy is reminiscent ofDeleuze's The logic ofsense (1990) on cinema and his concept of "unfounding" or effondement. Eileraas uses his concept as well as its legal meaning, referring to the term "unfounded claim" generally used in rape or sexual assault charges, thus devaluating and silencing the female voice. Both notions help to explain how Djebar stages the "unfounding" of nationalist and Orientalist historiography. The intersection of a great number of references regarding nationalism, transnational studies, sexuality, colonization, autobiography and visual culture could be daunting to the reader. The consistency and coherence of the volume reside in the formulation of the paradigm shift, true in each chapter. First, that the visual can embody a form of violence, the exotically conceived violence of representation, and in particular the representation of difference. Eileraas further posits that postcolonial feminist artists can participate in this violence, at...