Madness in 20th and 21st century francophone Caribbean women writers

Mutidjo, Anne

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/117550 Copy

Description

Title

Madness in 20th and 21st century francophone Caribbean women writers

Author(s)

Mutidjo, Anne

Issue Date

2022-11-14

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Reynolds, Felisa V

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Reynolds, Felisa V

Committee Member(s)

• Hilger, Stephanie
• Proulx, François
• Gaillard, Julie

Department of Study

French and Italian

Discipline

French

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

altered states of consciousness, capitalism, censorship, corporeality, culture, decolonial ecology, decolonialism, disease, (dis)embodiment, ecofeminism, embodied cognition, feminisms, health humanities, illness (narratives), knowledge, madness, nature, performativity, police brutality, postcolonialism, (post)modernism, solipsistic consciousness, systems of production of knowledge

Abstract

Francophone Caribbean literature often uses the language of disease to relate the experience of otherness. This is especially true about mental illness. However, the majority of scholarly work examines it within contexts which reproduce the dominant Western medical methodologies. I examine how women of color’s representations of mental illness respond to imposed colonial perspectives, especially related to the decolonization of established processes of knowledge production and meaning-making. To do so, I center women of color’s embodied experiences to demonstrate how their articulation of madness questions the legacies of colonialism. Furthermore, I reframe the way mental illness is diagnosed by deliberately inscribing their mental “conditions” outside of the normative framework of mental disorder assessment, to instead favor an endogenous and alternative perspective on cognition, consciousness, corporeality and psychosomatic disorder. Ultimately, I demonstrate how these literary diagnostics mobilize women’s embodied experience to consider a more holistic approach to contemporary issues including mental health, one that takes into consideration the existent power structures and their impact on issues of knowledge-making, ethics, and racial and social justice. Authors include: Simone Schwarz-Bart, Fabienne Kanor, Gerty Dambury and Nicole Cage-Florentiny

Graduation Semester

2022-12

Type of Resource

Thesis

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2022 Anne Mutidjo

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