Hybrid Anxieties by C. L. Quinan

Abstract

Reviewed by: Hybrid Anxieties by C. L. Quinan Mallory Nischan Quinan, C. L. Hybrid Anxieties. U of Nebraska P, 2020. Pp 276. ISBN 978-1-4962-0681-7. $99 (hardcover). $30 (paper and eBook). In Hybrid Anxieties, Professor of Gender Studies C. L. Quinan brings together queer theory and postcolonial studies to investigate how identity intertwines with literature and film in the wake of the French-Algerian War (1954-1962). Arguing that the postwar period provided a context in which hegemonic masculinity could be challenged and reconfigured, Quinan shows how rethinking gender, sexuality, and nationality can be productive and redemptive. The works are situated after decolonization and the book is attuned to content and form, illustrating questions of identity and hybridity. Quinan connects the violence in Algeria and the 1961 Paris massacre, in which hundreds of Algerian protestors were drowned in the Seine, with the 2005 Paris riots and the 2015 attacks on Charlie Hebdo to show the legacy of colonialism in the neocolonial present. Showing inherent connections between queer and postcolonial theories, the book navigates fluidly between them while studying a crucial historical moment. Part One explores masculinity, violence, and memory, filling a gap in the scholarship on the French-Algerian war which lacks consideration of how forgetting shapes identity. Quinan pairs Alain Resnais' film Muriel, or the Time of a Return (1963) with Laurent Mauvignier's novel The Wound (2009), which follow former conscripts named Bernard who served in Algeria and center the male body and its trauma through the absence of the female body. Quinan continues with Michael Haneke's film Caché (2005) which follows Georges and his troubled interactions with Majid, whose parents worked for Georges' family before disappearing in 1961. Despite cultivating a life free of Majid, Georges is confronted with repressed guilt and refuses to take responsibility for his actions. Part One illustrates the violent effects of repressing the colonial past, but Quinan shows that the "disintegration of the protagonists' white French masculinity" suggests alternative possibilities (93). Part Two considers textual representations of queer identity and embodiment that question traditional narrativity, subvert norms, and deconstruct dominant modes of masculinity in the aftermath of the war. Chapter Three focuses on Pierre [End Page 186] Guyotat's novel Eden, Eden, Eden (1970), a censored text in which desire, sexuality, and colonial violence are inseparable. Quinan draws on Herbert Marcuse who reworks subjectivity to imagine a body that is no longer an instrument of labor, but of pleasure, free of normative institutions and kinship structures. Eden, Eden, Eden illustrates Marcuse's utopia and serves as a counterpoint to the masculinity described in part one. Quinan argues that reading Marcuse, Guyotat, and Foucault, whose cornerstone text History of Sexuality was undoubtedly influenced by Guyotat, together supplements poststructuralist, feminist, and queer forms of critique. Chapter Four reads memory through a queer lens and asks how diasporic subjects engage with memory in Leila Sebbar's The Seine was Red (1999). Though the characters illustrate hybridity through their backgrounds, Quinan does not focus on personal identities but considers how the novel challenges normative temporality through the intersection of gender, nationality, and memory. Wrestling with the event thirty-five years later, the protagonists retrace the protest, covering up WWII monuments with facts about the Algerian resistance. In their rejection of linear narratives of progress, they redraw "colonial cartographies" as a "counter-memory" to the official history in which the event has been willfully forgotten (131). Chapter Five reads Nina Bouraoui's Tomboy (2000) as a bridge between queerness and postcoloniality, arguing that expressing masculinity through the protagonist's changing female body dissociates masculinity from men and illustrates the in betweenness felt by many postwar subjects. Gender ambiguity and queer desire reinforce feelings of unbelonging while questioning borders of gender and nationality. In negotiating a hybrid identity born out of the French-Algerian War, Nina's fluid masculinity functions as a queer practice. Scholars have read Nina as either the author or a girl with an identity crisis, but Quinan takes an intersectional approach consistent with current modes of queer critique, showing entanglements between nationality, race, and gender. Hybrid Anxieties will interest scholars working on contemporary France or Algeria as it reflects how...