Critical Conditions: Illness and Disability in Francophone African and Caribbean Women’s Writing by Julie Nack Ngue

Abstract

around the ways in which space and time work together to configure memory. Jean Sgard opens the volume by exploring the interactions between external and subjective worlds that shape happiness as reminiscence in La nouvelle Héloïse and the Confessions. Taking as point of departure Rousseau’s fascination with time distilled into instants or turning points that forever alter the course of events, Claude Labrosse’s six articles on La nouvelle Héloïse show the intricacy of Rousseau’s use of writing to master time, subtly modifying it to produce pleasurable emotional effects for his readers and for his own recollection. Pierre Rétat and Jean-François Perrin extend to the Confessions and Rêveries analyses of Rousseau’s strategic structuring of time and thereby of personal, ethical memory anchored in conscience. Contributors to part two include JeanFran çois Perrin, Michael O’Dea, Pierre Saby, Christophe Cave, Anne-Marie MercierFaivre ,Yves Citton, and Denis Reynaud. Their studies of the Confessions, the Rêveries, Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques, Le devin du Village, Émile, the Lettres écrites de la Montagne evoke patterns that treat each work as a contributive part of a totality, one that is supple enough to encompass contradictions yet endowed with moral integrity. The volume as a whole superbly validates Yves Citton’s insight into the musical nature of Rousseau’s oeuvre: each work is a unique note endowed with its own pitch, timbre, and character; when these notes join forces, they produce chords that resonate with enhanced power and meaningfulness. By demonstrating that Rousseau creates truth dynamically by resolving dissonances into precarious harmonies, Voix et mémoire confirms the vitality of Rousseau scholarship—and of Rousseau’s own work—for the twenty-first century. Smith College (MA) Mary Ellen Birkett Nack Ngue, Julie. Critical Conditions: Illness and Disability in Francophone African and Caribbean Women’s Writing. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2012. ISBN 978-07391 -5114-3. Pp. ix + 196. $63. Nack Ngue’s study of eight novels by Francophone women, spanning 1968–2003, enriches both postcolonial and disability studies by effectively challenging a number of theoretical, geographical, and phenomenological divides. Relying on multiple valences of the term “critical condition,” Nack Ngue explores illness, disability, and abjection as“mutable constitutive processes open to refigurations”(2). She thus insists upon complex embodiment: the interplay between a body marked by variance, the discursive environments that produce it, and the subjective and textual processes that enable their negotiation. Brilliantly paired novels and a rich progression of analyses scaffold broad scope without undermining depth. Each based on comparative readings of two novels, successive chapters explore the parallel evolution of what Mitchell and Snyder have termed the‘cultural locations’of disability and what might be thought of here as cultural locations of postcolony: Nack Ngue brings together Vieux Chavet’s 220 FRENCH REVIEW 88.3 Reviews 221 Amour and Warner-Vieyra’s Juletane to examine the primal encounter in disability studies—the stare—and the protagonists’ recuperation of their narratives through surreptitious observation; Condé’s Heremakhonon and Bugul’s Le baobab fou to study the quest for a cure and the failed promise of integrative healing as emblems of uneasy testimony and attempts at postcolonial reconciliation; Diagne Sène’s Le chant des ténèbres and Bugul’s La folie et la mort to consider how marked bodies are cast as impediments to the smooth circulation of capital in the era of globalization; and finally, Bessora’s 53 cm and Fatou Diome’s Le ventre de l’Atlantique to explore the lives of African immigrant women living in France, whose bodies contaminate urban spaces and trouble phantasmatic notions of nation and belonging. Calling for‘contact,’these analyses engage a methodology that intentionally juxtaposes disparate texts and allies lenses of analysis. They overturn traditional readings of the sick and disabled female body as an easy metaphor for postcolonial alienation in favor of nuanced readings of lived and shifting subjectivities. They negotiate rifts within disability studies between the ‘social model’ of disablement and the subjective, embodied experience of impairment , trauma and pain while at the same time revealing spaces for rewriting and self-determination. Postcolonial and disability studies have come of age...