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Should the Subaltern Clean?
- Mosaic: an interdisciplinary critical journal
- Mosaic, an interdisciplinary critical journal
- Volume 53, Number 1, March 2020
- pp. 39-54
- 10.1353/mos.2020.0006
- Article
- Additional Information
Abstract:
This essay investigates, through a reading of contemporary French fiction, the politics of naming “the help.” It considers how cleaning ladies are both rendered hypervisible and required to be invisible; it examines how they tidy up the narration, while performing what one could term a perverse effet de réel.