Conflict Bodies: The Politics of Rape Representation in the Francophone Imaginary by Régine Michelle Jean-Charles (review)

In Conflict Bodies: The Politics of Rape Representation in the Francophone Imaginary, Régine Michelle Jean-Charles offers a timely study of the ways in which gendered violence is represented in francophone literature, film, and criticism. Jean-Charles argues that despite the prevalence of rape in conflict zones and a general fascination with violence, francophone critics have not adequately confronted the issue of sexual violence against women. Indeed, many recent works on francophone women’s writing—including those that emphasize the body and sexuality (Cazenave; Orlando; Smith; Edwards)—curiously elide the issue of rape. Jean-Charles looks to fill this critical lacuna in Conflict Bodies by reading scenes of sexual violence, questioning the different kinds of silence surrounding rape, privileging women’s embodied subjectivity, and foregrounding the ways both activists and writers counter rape culture. Her study encompasses a wide array of texts from Africa and the Caribbean, with chapters focusing on political rape in Haiti, the rape of the land in Guadeloupe, genocidal rape in Rwanda, and rape as a weapon of war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Jean-Charles brings an admirable clarity, nuance, and political engagement to her material and forges original connections between literary culture and popular activism. Her scholarship is particularly well attuned to recent developments in the fields of francophone studies, transnational global feminisms, and human rights criticism; more significantly, it charts out new connections between these fields.

Jean-Charles’s central endeavor in Conflict Bodies is to show how various types of narratives—from novels to human rights reports, films, photography, documentaries, drama, and radio journalism—destabilize “key ideologies of violence and provide new frameworks for understanding sexual violence in a global age” (2). From the very first page, the book links literary studies to activism; the author opens with an account of a march organized by Congolese women in 2010 against sexual violence. The march not only presents women as advocates, survivors, and agitators, but it also allows Jean-Charles to question how Western readers and critics can most productively engage with women from Africa and the Global South, a question that returns most notably in the chapters on Haiti, Rwanda, and the DRC. Aligning herself with scholars like Wendy Hesford, Jean-Charles is critical of the politics of advocacy in human rights discourse and its overreliance on spectacular representations of violence to inspire empathy and motivate intervention. Such an approach, she argues, not only fails to take into account the impact of colonialism and globalization on contemporary economic, political, and social realities in Africa and the Caribbean, but also maintains a neocolonialist imbalance of power that invests the possibility of change and intervention solely in the hands of the Western actors. In order to get beyond a mode of reading/viewing rape that operates on affect, deprives subjects of agency, and erases specificity, she points to ways in which texts complicate representations of rape, whether by bringing into play multiple voices, resisting narrative closure, or by exposing the tensions between individual experience and the broader phenomenon of sexual violence.

By far, the most impressive feature of the book is the way each chapter fosters a dialogue among a variety of literary, popular, and critical voices. Chapter 1, “Bound to Violence? A History of the Rape Trope in Francophone Studies,” argues that critics need to recognize both the violence of rape and the centrality of rape within the more general phenomenon of violence. The chapter begins with an overview of works from Joseph Zobel’s La Rue Cases-Nègres to Yambo Oulouguem’s Le Devoir de violence and Ahmadou Kourouma’s Les Soleils des indépendances, as well as multiple works by Ousmane Sembene and Edouard Glissant. It then considers how rape figures in the work of francophone women writers such as Maryse Condé, Calixthe Beyala, Ken Bugul, and Evelyne Trouillot, drawing on a variety of feminist...