Voices and Veils: Feminism and Islam in French Women’s Writing and Activism by Anna Kemp

Abstract

and identity renewed and remodelled itself through an encounter with and assimilation of a host of cultural differences” (3). Nowadays it is fair to say that France likes jazz and that there is a certain Frenchness in contemporary jazz, but this beautiful integration has not always been obvious. The relationship between France and jazz was, in the course of the twentieth century, a love-hate story. But what is even more fascinating is that France embraced jazz in a way that most American media never did. Through the analysis of how the different debates on jazz functioned in the French cultural discourse from the Occupation up to the years following the Libération, the book shows not only that jazz was perceived, at first, as a marker of otherness and un-Frenchness, but also that it went through a transvaluation that led it to become an inherent part of the modern definition of French identity. Jordan’s book offers a remarkable study on how “true” French culture changed, and how France came to term with the jazz art form. Jordan views the debate surrounding jazz, as just such a ritualized cultural practice, one that mattered in that it enabled people to negotiate their cultural identity [...] the debate about aesthetics allowed for important cultural work that slowly shifted the unconscious ideological frames [...] by emphasizing certain constructions about what it meant to be French. (5) Jordan is perfectly aware that terms such as “true,” “authentic,” and “real” used in relation to French culture are always contested and he is not trying to argue otherwise. The book does not claim to procure any one single univocal truth about jazz in relation to French culture and identity nor does it essentialize jazz and French culture, but as Jordan clearly states in his introduction, examining jazz as a part of French popular culture shows the importance of the role of music in the definition and construction of cultural identity. For this reason Jordan’s book is a remarkable text: it offers an intelligent approach to jazz in France but also a different and sophisticated entry to cultural identity. Bennington College (VT) Jean-Frédéric Hennuy KEMP, ANNA. Voices and Veils: Feminism and Islam in French Women’s Writing and Activism. London: Legenda, 2010. ISBN 978-1-906540-26-5. Pp. x + 148. £40. Kemp’s well-conceived monograph on French representations of Muslim women since the nineteenth century is nothing if not timely. Following France’s enforcement of the first European law banning full-face veils in public in April 2011, the central place accorded Muslim women in the battle over what it means to be a French citizen in the twenty-first century is being hotly contested. In her introduction, Kemp lucidly spells out her goals: to highlight the writings and discourses of French Muslim women whose voices have been marginalized during the public debate following the 2004 headscarf affair, and to provide an historical perspective explaining why contemporary models for Muslim womanhood in France are informed by a persistent colonial legacy. The first chapter is devoted to three writers who adopt a feminist approach to the representation of Muslim women that is firmly situated within a colonial frame of reference. Kemp chose these works, written by Suzanne Voilquin, Hubertine Auclert, and Marie Bujéja between 1866 and 1921, because “firstly, when Reviews 1179 viewed chronologically they reveal feminism’s progressive entanglement in colonial strategy; and secondly they plot the emergence of a distinctive French feminist identity constructed in relation to the Muslim-Arab woman” (9). The insights gained from her compelling arguments about these writers’ “colonial feminism” serve as the foundation upon which her ensuing analysis is predicated. Her second chapter explores contemporary feminist discourses about Muslim women that, she maintains, continue to be rooted in a colonial point of view favoring the interests of French Republicanism. Shifting her focus to the recent controversy around the public wearing of the headscarf in France, she asserts: “the feminism of the affair [...] constructed gender equality as a republican achievement under threat, legitimizing neocolonial attitudes and transforming feminism, as a forward -looking political position, into a defense of a reified (and regressive) notion of ‘femininity...