Isabelle Eberhardt and North Africa: A Carnivalesque Mirage by Lynda Chouiten (review)

Reviews 257 (135), his refusal of totalization and completion. Chambers’s text constitutes a splendid achievement. University of Pennsylvania Gerald Prince Chouiten, Lynda. Isabelle Eberhardt and North Africa: A Carnivalesque Mirage. Lanham: Lexington, 2015. ISBN 978-0-7391-8592-6. Pp. 217. $85. At first glance, the life of Isabelle Eberhardt (1877–1904) seems to exemplify the subversive potential of nomadism and hybridity. The Swiss-born child of Russian and Armenian parents, Eberhardt traveled to Algeria, converted to Islam, wore men’s clothing, and married an Arab. But read closely, her diaries, letters, and fiction present a somewhat different figure. In her study of Eberhardt’s life and works, Chouiten argues that rather than subvert Orientalist understandings of race and gender, Eberhardt leveraged unconventional strategies—cross-dressing and religious conversion—to occupy a position of power from which to espouse a conventional worldview that supported the colonial project. While biographies of Eberhardt have tended to focus on her diaries and letters, Chouiten pays particular attention to her fiction as a way of plotting the author’s moral and political convictions. The first chapter analyzes Eberhardt’s stratified conception of race in North Africa. Previous studies have credited her with a positive portrayal of Maghrebis, but Chouiten explains that Eberhardt’s descriptive generosity extends only to Arabs, while other North Africans—Berbers, Jews, and black Africans—are reduced to crude stereotypes. By differentiating between Algeria’s indigenous cultures and pitting these groups against one another, Eberhardt practiced an “ethics of distance” (3) that mimicked colonial discourse. In the second chapter, Chouiten discusses Eberhardt’s conversion to Islam. As a white convert, she was able to serve as a cultural intermediary between local leaders and the colonial administration, combining her European privilege with a post-conversion ability to circulate freely among North Africans. As an interlocutor between these two populations, she enjoyed a strategic importance uncommon to women in the colonies. The third chapter argues that by dressing like a man, Eberhardt achieved a degree of power that she thought incompatible with her gender, and in so doing, endorsed the prevailing view of women and reinforced the male/female dichotomy. Chouiten contends that for Eberhardt, cross-dressing was a “will-topower ” that reflected “her absorption of racial and gender laws” (135). The final chapter weighs the ideological implications of Eberhardt’s mobility, and Chouiten challenges critics who see in Eberhardt an example of “nomadism,” in the Deleuzian/ Guattarian sense of the term. When she moved, it was often not by choice and with considerable reluctance. Chouiten characterizes Eberhardt’s“eulogizing of nomadism” as a “self-consoling rhetorical strategy” (181) that belies the writer’s participation in the very power structures that nomadism works to oppose. Chouiten frequently tacks between discussions of Eberhardt’s eccentric performances of race, gender, and religion and the conservative morality found in her writing. More could have been said, however, about the possibility that this conservatism is an empowering performance rather than some genuine expression of belief. In a life carefully confected to achieve power in a racist, patriarchal system, Eberhardt may have been donning various ideological costumes in her writing in order to confirm her audience’s existing beliefs. If hers was ultimately a Nietzschean project of willing herself to maximum power, as Chouiten maintains, could we read Eberhardt’s repetition of colonial doxa as just another tactic? Florida State University Corbin Treacy Crevier Goulet, Sarah-Anaïs. Entre le texte et le corps: deuil et différence sexuelle chez Hélène Cixous. Paris: Champion, 2015. ISBN 978-2-7453-2783-3. Pp. 293. 55 a. Cette étude est divisée en deux parties si distinctes qu’elles semblent se suivre de manière quelque peu artificielle. La première partie analyse diverses perspectives philosophiques et psychanalytiques sur le deuil, la notion de mélancolie et la différence sexuelle, ainsi que les questions d’identification qui y sont liées. La deuxième partie est consacrée aux écrits d’Hélène Cixous. Cette dislocation du livre explique la présence, dans la deuxième partie, de nombreux rappels des questions théoriques étudiées dans la première partie. Malgré cela, l’application...