Critical Conditions

Critical Conditions: Reading Illness and Disability in Francophone African and Caribbean Women's Writing, represents a novel approach not only to postcolonial Francophone literature but to literary and cultural studies in general. Julie Nack Ngue's analyses attend not only to the aesthetics of the texts, but to culturally relevant scientific and historical discourses on the body, gender, and race, and to the material conditions that produce and exacerbate illness and disability. Adopting a comparative, interdisciplinary approach, Nack Ngue argues that cultural and literary expressions of illness, suffering, and subjectivity in the postcolonial context are always in dialogue with seemingly external discourses and practices of health. Thus, through sustained analyses of historical, biomedical and sociocultural currents in the context of eight Francophone novels from 1968 to 2003, the book advances a new theory of "critical conditions." These critical conditions represent the conjunction of bodily, psychic, and textual states that defy conventional definitions of health and well-being. The study focuses on Francophone women writers who offer striking commentaries on the experience of illness and/or disability and its attendant discourses: Haitian writer Marie Chauvet; Guadeloupian-Senegalese writer Myriam Warner-Vieyra; Guadeloupian writer Maryse Conde; Senegalese writers Ken Bugul, Fama Diagne Sene, and Fatou Diome; and Swiss-Gabonese writer Bessora. These women's writings disclose figures of illness and disability in the postcolonial context that challenge standard paradigms of women's bodily and psychic health established by Western colonial medicine and racial biology such as those that idealize cure, demand normativity, and assign tragedy to the "unhealthy."