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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™
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Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature
Bessora; Beyala; colonial memory; female body; Hottentot; Venus; Senghor; sexuality
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Femme Nue, Femme Noire : Tribulations D’Une Vénus, Lydie Moudileno
Femme Nue, Femme Noire : Tribulations D’Une Vénus, Lydie Moudileno
Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature
This article examines the return, in two contemporary novels, of the figure of the “naked black woman” as an emblematic site of difference. Two women of African origin take back this twice-appropriated figure and use it to question the ways in which the materiality of the body is again being written into contemporary postcolonial society. The aim of the essay is to underline the means and meaning deployed in these new appropriations of African icons, while pointing to some possible limits to the symbolic passage from the colonial imagination to a postcolonial one.