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  • The Riddle of Racial Difference in Anne Garréta's Sphinx

    Author(s):
    Annabel Kim (see profile)
    Date:
    2018
    Group(s):
    CLCS 20th- and 21st-Century, LLC 20th- and 21st-Century French, TC Women’s and Gender Studies, TM Literary Criticism
    Subject(s):
    Sex in literature, Race in literature, Feminist criticism, French literature, Twentieth century, Fiction
    Item Type:
    Article
    Tag(s):
    Garréta, Wittig, Gender and race in literature, Gender and sexuality, 20th-century French literature, Novel (genre)
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6986Z
    Abstract:
    This article examines Sphinx, the debut novel of the French novelist Anne Garréta, which was recently published in English translation in 2015. The reception of Sphinx in both French and English has focused primarily on Garréta’s virtuosic removal of gender from a love story, passing over a caricatural and crude rendering of racial difference that is at odds with the novel’s impelling ethos of “Fuck difference.” By attending to what Garréta describes as her debt to Monique Wittig, I show that Sphinx, far from being an exemplar of a second-wave feminism marked by a blindness to or instrumentalization of race, actually builds up racial difference as a Trojan Horse to combat difference in all its identitarian forms. Sphinx, in its radical anti-identitarianism, demonstrates the political potentiality of the novel form and challenges its readers to imagine an indeterminate existence outside all identity categories.
    Metadata:
    xml
    Published as:
    Journal article     Show details
    Pub. DOI:
    doi:10.1353/dia.2017.0000
    Publisher:
    Johns Hopkins University Press
    Pub. Date:
    2018-2-4
    Journal:
    diacritics
    Volume:
    45
    Issue:
    1
    Page Range:
    4 - 22
    ISSN:
    1080-6539
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    5 years ago
    License:
    All Rights Reserved

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    Item Name: pdf diacritics-riddle-of-racial-difference-authors-final-version.pdf
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