Yale French Studies, Number 146

A collection of interdisciplinary critical essays examining the political and aesthetic practices of Martinican French author, filmmaker, and journalist Fabienne Kanor.

In this volume of Yale French Studies, editor Gladys M. Francis assembles the first collection of essays focused on the work of award-winning author, filmmaker, and journalist Fabienne Kanor. The volume examines the transgressive aesthetics of Kanor's films, literature, performances, and journalism through critical essays, film illustrations, personal travel and working notes, original photos, and a heretofore unpublished essay by Kanor herself.

Broken into three sections, the volume first analyses Kanor's central aesthetic—the painful corporeal experiences through which her Black characters push limitations and transform themselves—then turns to her critical and contemporary construction of feminism and concludes with her signature trope: embodied movement across the West, Africa, and the Americas. The collection demonstrates Kanor's feminist politics and explores how her artistic productions disrupt traditional phallocentric, imperialist discourse and commemoration, offering challenging aesthetics and representations of the Black body, trauma, migration, (neo-)colonization, gender, and sexual minorities.

In a moving coda, Kanor's original essay asks readers to reach into their invisible and untold history, to recover themselves and manifest the power of their individual and collective memory.