Akua Ananse Is a “She”

In this essay, I channel Kweku Ananse, the trickster in West African tales. Extending upon this figure, I re-gender Kweku Ananse as Akua Ananse and offer “spider stories” to make sense of my transnational identities as a West African and French woman, who is a professor in US academe. I offer a conversation between Akua Ananse, my French-speaking grandmother figure Marie, and my professional self. My spider stories subvert usual categories of knowledge and function as a form of episteme. They borrow from the genre of Indigenous folktales, which have historically been dismissed as appropriate knowledge under Western-centered worldviews.

The Plight of Women in Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy

This paper deals with the plight of women characters in Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy. It focuses chiefly on the colonial rule that the situation is even shoddier. Opium affects the life of all women characters in a straight line or in a roundabout way. It aims to tell in brief about the women characters with the extraordinary spotlight on the characters of Deeti, Paulette, daughter of a French botanist living in Calcutta; she respects Indian culture even though being a French woman and Shireen in particular. It represents exploring the emotional world of women, which helps the readers to connect and empathize with their situations. Through these characters, the lives of women are described and the survival of life with suffering and hardships.

Representing the Twenty-First Century Migrant Experience: Adam and Fleutiaux’s Problematic Empathy

In recent years, a trend in French literature has emerged among non-migrant French authors. In her 2018 study, The Migrant Canon in Twenty-First-Century France, Sabo describes this trend as “the emergence of French authors who write about migration” (27). Similarly, Louviot argued that “the drama of migrants dying on Europe’s doorstep has inspired many […] French writers with no postcolonial or (im)migrant background” (6). This article—which focuses on two texts, À l’abri de rien by Olivier Adam (2007) and Destiny by Pierrette Fleutiaux (2016)—examines how non-migrant French authors have attempted to give a voice to illegal migrants in their recent literary works. Each work recounts the story of a French woman who attempts to help one or several migrants as they navigate horrid living conditions (in a Calais-like city in À l’abri de rien and in Paris in Destiny), suffer mental and physical breakdowns, and face French authorities. This study demonstrates that there is an inherent ambivalence at the heart of how these two non-migrant French authors have attempted to voice the plight of today’s illegal migrants in France. While Adam and Fleutiaux’s texts aim to foster empathy toward migrants, they also feature complex altruistic motives that are far from selfless. Adam and Fleutiaux strive to humanize migrants and their trajectories by creating an empathic discourse of care. However, migrant characters are also portrayed as passive objects of fascination becoming pawn-like figures in the lives of the two white female protagonists. The article questions these characters’ altruism by analyzing how their own mental states overpower their empathic drives, thus bringing to light the questionable reasons why these two women become consumed by the need to help migrants. Ultimately, these considerations help build a critique of the problematic empathy Adam and Fleutiaux have constructed and its ethical ramifications.

Voix Blanche?

One of the most important ‘nouvelle vérités’ that has challenged 1970s feminisms in the Anglophone world is intersectionality, and particularly the need to address race and ethnicity as constantly interacting with gender, sexuality, class and other variables; This chapter provides some general reflections on the extent to which a similar crisis and trajectory are present in French feminist histories and narratives, but its main focus is a case-study of Annie Ernaux’s work in this regard, considering questions that have rarely been asked in Ernaux criticism to date: to what extent does Ernaux engage with race and ethnicity as well as class and gender in her writing? If she is an unusually intersectional writer in terms of gender, sexuality and class, and in more recent years one might add age and ageing, does this approach and the strong influence of sociology on Ernaux’s writing lead to awareness of dimensions of oppression that she herself as a white French woman has not personally experienced? How does Ernaux write her own whiteness? Is the ‘I’ of Ernaux’s texts, whether fictional or autobiographical, ‘unevoix blanche’, adopting the cloak of universal whiteness?

Research in a Minefield: Relating with Tea Party Activists

Based on a doctoral research project on Tea Party groups in Pennsylvania, this article deals both with the various pitfalls I had to learn to avoid and the significant impact that being a young, white French woman had on the way activists interacted with me. In addition, I reflect upon the general ramifications of studying a right-wing social movement while not aligning with it politically. The automatic distance—and presumed ensuing objectivity that this viewpoint initially seems to afford—is much more fragile and complicated than apparent at first glance.

Vinegar and weight loss in women of eighteenth-century France: a lesson from the past

This short note reports the eighteenth-century account of Mademoiselle Lapaneterie, a French woman who started drinking vinegar to lose weight and died one month later. The case, which was first published by Pierre Desault in 1733, has not yet been reported by present-day behavioural scholars. Similar reports about cases in 1776 are also presented, confirming that some women were using vinegar for weight loss. Those cases can be conceived as a lesson from the past for contemporary policies against the deceptive marketing of potentially hazardous weight-loss products.

Aspirational Descent and the Creation of Family Lore: Race Shifting in the Northeast

This article builds on work examining how hundreds of thousands of white French descendants in the northeastern part of the continent have been shifting into “Indigenous” identities in the past two decades or so. The first part of the paper explains the workings of “aspirational descent,” that is, when a French woman from the 1600s is turned into an “Indigenous” ancestor for the purpose of claiming indigeneity in the present. The second part of the paper explores the creation of “family lore” by several French descendants using aspirational descent in courtroom testimony. Overall, the author illustrates how stories about long-ago Indigenous ancestry in white settler families, such as that of Elizabeth Warren, often involve creative interpretations of childhood stories that rely on the logic of elimination inherent to settler colonialism.

Draft Genome Sequence of Lactobacillus crispatus Strain V4, Isolated from a Vaginal Swab from a Young Healthy Nonmenopausal Woman

Lactobacillus crispatus strain V4 was isolated from a vaginal swab from a healthy nonmenopausal 35-year-old French woman. We report here its draft genome sequence of 2,091,889 bp, with an average G+C content of 37.02%.