Exiles, Travellers and Vagabonds: Rethinking Mobility in Francophone Women’s Writing. Edited By Kate Averis and Isabel Hollis-Touré.

Abstract

This rich collection explores literary representations of women’s mobility in the context of accelerating transnational movement and widespread social and political anxiety about border-crossings. In their knowledgeable Introduction, the editors recognize the historical tendency to depict mobility as a masculine phenomenon and the need to engage with the specificities of women’s movement, before suggesting how representations of women’s mobility might rethink traditional associations of women with home and nation, trouble categories of movement and the genres associated with them, and give expression to new modes of female subjectivity. The book’s twelve chapters and Afterword bring together distinguished and emerging scholars to reflect on the work of a variety of writers whose real or imagined journeys span the French-speaking world. Appropriately the book begins at home with Isabel Hollis-Touré’s subtle analysis of women’s sense of estrangement from their domestic environment — an estrangement that may catalyse movement — via a consideration of the work of Cameroonian author Léonora Miano. The interior exile that motivates or results from movement is a key theme of the collection as a whole. Jeannette den Toonder explores the psychological displacement of the migrant in her reading of Vietnamese-Québecoise Kim Thúy’s poetic prose, while Siobhán McIlvanney’s chapter on Algerian writers Malika Mokkadem and Maïssa Bey focuses on the ways in which women trapped in a rigidly patriarchal society are forced into an imaginative ‘internal exile’ in which the mind travels beyond the material constraints of the present. Indeed, one strength of the collection is the care with which the contributors reflect on different modes of movement — virtual and real, chosen and forced, legal and illegal, perilous and playful — and the ways these intersect and overlap. In his insightful chapter on women’s writing in post-earthquake Haiti, for example, Charles Forsdick pays close attention to differential forms of displacement and embeds his readings in an intersectional understanding of mobilities as shaped by class, ethnicity, and gender. Furthermore, while contributors are attuned to the subversive potentials of female mobility — see, for example, Dúnlaith Bird’s engaging analysis of Isabelle Eberhardt’s ‘vagabondage’ — the limits of notions of nomadism as liberation are also recognized. Christopher Hogarth’s study of Fatou Diome considers the Senegalese writer’s tempering of her early portrayals of successful female migration, while Jane Hiddleston’s compelling reading of Leïla Sebbar emphasizes the persistent sense of loss and rootlessness that flows beneath her apparent embrace of hybridity. The final chapters explore the potential of francophone women’s writing of mobility to construct new forms that do not merely reflect on the world but act within it: Anna-Louise Milne elegantly presents the playful possibilities of Louise Kaplan’s ‘transnational poetics’, while Margarita Alfaro identifies what she calls ‘ectopic literature’ with the creation of a modern female myth that re-imagines the relationship between the individual and democracy. This diverse collection breaks down traditional categories of displacement to produce a more precise and variegated landscape of inter- and intra-cultural movement and the itineraries of those who move through it. As such, it is both valuable and timely.