Oceanic bellies and liquid feminism in Fatou Diome’s Le Ventre de l’Atlantique

Bibliographic Data

ID19005529
AuthorsPolo Belina Moji (0000-0002-9109-3075, University of Cape Town, corresponding author)
Year2022
Volume37
Issue2
Pages298-315
Publication date2022-08-25
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueCultural Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0950-2386 • E-ISSN: 1466-4348
PublisherRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/09502386.2022.2104899
OpenAlexW4293230546
LanguageFR
References cited13

Winner of the 2003 Prix des Hémisphères Chantal Lapicque, and translated into German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and English, Fatou Diome’s 2003 Diome, F., 2003. Le ventre de l'Atlantique. Paris: Anne Carrière. [Google Scholar] novel, Le Ventre de l’Atlantique [ The Belly of the Atlantic, 2006] plays on the image of the Atlantic as an oceanic belly. This article explores the usefulness of the black Atlantic epistemology (Glissant 1990 Glissant, E., 1990. Poétique de la relation (Poétique III). Paris: Gallimard. [Google Scholar], Gilroy 1993 Gilroy, P., 1993. The black atlantic: double consciousness and modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [Google Scholar]) as a site for imagining the production of diasporic space, alongside the critique that ‘by excluding Africa, Gilroy has in effect narrowed the Africanness or Africanity of the ‘Black Atlantic’ (Masilela 1996 Masilela, N., 1996. The “black atlantic” and african modernity in South Africa. Research in african literatures 27. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 88–96. [Google Scholar], p. 88). Through Diome’s novel, I explore how this intersects with a feminist project of rendering visible the spatialization of difference, through an engagement with the geographies of domination. Borrowing from Zymunt Bauman’s (2006) notion of liquid modernity, I therefore propose ‘liquid feminism’ as a framework that relates the globalised oceanic mobilities of African migrants to the structures of patriarchal domination which render black women’s lives ‘ungeographic’ (McKittrick 2006 Mckittrick, K., 2006. Demonic grounds: black women and the cartographies of struggle. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. [Google Scholar]).I start by exploring the geographic sensibility of Diome’s poetics, including her use of the language of geography and her personification of the Atlantic Ocean. I then analyse how her portrayal of a geulwaar matriclan subverts the notion of Western feminism as rescuing African women who are trapped by ‘tradition’. Finally, I explore Diome’s notion of ‘geographic suicide’ as associated with the reflexivity of African women as modern subjects a site for the ‘affective mapping’ (Flatley 2009 Flatley, J., 2009. Affective mapping. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. [Google Scholar]) of diasporic identity. Ultimately, the article illustrates how Diome’s feminist re-imagining of the black Atlantic centres Africa and Africanness, combating the temporal dislocation that fixes the continent as a space that is lost in the originary moment of rupture of the Middle Passage

Art · Art history · Feminism · Modernity · Portuguese · Sociology · African history and culture studies · Anthropology · Gender Studies · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Travel Writing and Literature

Tools

Open DOI