Foreign Bodies

by Dobie, Madeleine

• ISBN13: 9780804741040
• ISBN10: 0804741042
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-01-01
• Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr

Summary

Building on the critical foundations established by Edward Said in Orientalism, Foreign Bodies examines the relationship between the Orientalist tradition in French art and literature and France's colonial history. It focuses on a central dimension of this exchange: the prevalent figure of the "oriental woman", and the interplay of race and gender in both domestic and colonial history. It also offers a genealogy of contemporary French attitudes to Islamic culture, in which beliefs about sexuality and gender relations continue to occupy a privileged place.

The author examines the extent to which the rhetorical status and political implications of Orientalism register the changing circumstances of French colonial activity, tracing the convergence, or divergence, of colonial practice and the literary record. She also argues against the tendency, in both historical and theoretical writing on colonialism, to divide center from margins, metropolitan from colonial. Instead, she shows how colonial products and ideas permeated the domestic culture and shaped its evolu

Author Biography

Madeleine Dobie is Associate Professor of French at Tulane University.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	ix
Preface	xi
Introduction	1	(34)
Polygamy, Slavery, and the Colonies: Montesquieu's De l'Esprit des lois	35	(26)
Truth and Representations: Old and New Languages in the Letters persanes	61	(22)
Intimacy Exposed: Gender, Race, and Language in the Oriental Tale	83	(38)
Split Figures: Women and Language in the Oriental Travelogue	121	(26)
The Modernist Turn in Orientalism: Gautier's Egyptian Tales	147	(35)
Conclusion	182	(3)
Notes	185	(28)
Works Cited	213	(14)
Index	227