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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
- Status:
- Published
- Last Updated:
- 6 years ago
- License:
- All Rights Reserved
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