Odious Caribbean Women and the Palpable Aesthetics of Transgression by Gladys M. Francis (review)

In Odious Caribbean Women and the Palpable Aesthetics of Transgression, Gladys M. Francis undertakes an ambitious, interdisciplinary study of works by francophone Caribbean women writers, visual artists, and performers. Her analysis expands on scholarship exploring individual and collective memory in colonial contexts by looking at performance and performativity in and across texts. The result is a renewed framework for interpreting representations of the displaced, violated black female body. In Francis's approach, the role of aesthetics in imparting meaning to the reader-spectator becomes primordial to art's impact. Through this frame, she introduces her concept of "corpomemorial tracing," a process by which a memory of the character's embodied experience is formed in the conscience of the reader-spectator, and "gives body to; embodies; gives presence to—a body (whether an individual or group)" (p. xvii). Corpomemorial tracing becomes a way for the spectator to engage with "the aesthetics of the odious" in an act of conscientious witnessing (p. xiv). The text proposes to expand and hone the regard for transgressive texts and their reinstatement of the objectified, forgotten Caribbean woman as a subject in history.

Francis confronts the problem of silences within the colonial archive by turning to the "performatic" elements of black visual and literary works (p. xiii). These are the elements indelibly linked to the body, a historical site of violences inscribed in individual and collective memory. Francis distinguishes her approach by focusing on works by female-identified creators with the intention of recognizing their often-ignored contributions to Caribbean thought and expression. To similar effect, she draws on the work of Lénablou, a Guadeloupean dancer and choreographer, and her study of gwoka and léwoz, features of a Guadeloupean music and dance tradition, to illustrate approaches to reading the fragmented body. Francis herself proposes her concept of "odious aesthetics," the troubling though distinctly non-commodifying motifs that arise from vivid depictions of bodily transgression as a crucial element to analyze. Francis looks, for example, at the novel Humus (2006) by Fabienne Kanor, in which a group of enslaved women each narrates a personal account of the Middle Passage. The women's testimonies relate sexual violations, nauseas, the flows of their bodily fluids, and moments of internalized revolt. The unsettling aesthetics of Kanor's texts transgress the boundaries between reader-spectator and the body in performance, forcing the two into an intersubjective experience. Through corpomemorial tracing, then, an experiential memory of the text is formed in the consciousness of the reader. Francis's theoretical paradigm thus identifies texts in which the body performs as a means for restoring the real or imagined phantoms of the Caribbean to historical memory.

Francis supports her arguments through analyses of plays such as Ina Césaire's Mémoires d'îles (1985; Island Memories, 1994), Maryse Condé's Pension Les Alizés (1988; The Tropical Breeze Hotel, 1994), and Gerty Dambury's Trames (2008; Shades, 2012); novels including Dambury's Les Rétifs (2012; The Restless, 2018), Gisèle Pineau's Cent vies et des poussières (2012; One hundred lives and dust), Simone Schwarz-Bart's Pluie et Vent sur Télumée Miracle (1972; The Bridge of Beyond, 2013), Miriam Warner-Vieyra's Juletane (1982; Juletane, 1987), and Kanor's Humus and D'eaux douces (2004; Freshwater); Kanor's performance Le Corps de l'Histoire (2016; The body of history); paintings by Béatrice Mélina; Sylvaine Dampierre's documentary film Le Pays à l'Envers (2007; The upside down country); and performances and techniques of Lénablou. Francis's well-developed theoretical framework incorporates concepts from psychoanalysis, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, gender studies, performance studies, and trauma studies. This interdisciplinary approach inspires a polyvocal reflection on the notions of the hybrid body and hybrid archive and the ways in which they contend with western ontological conventions of identity, knowledge, and truth. Francis begins by exploring the body as a site of...