Mixed Race Studies

Davidson Welcomes New Professors into the Fold

Davidson College
Davidson, North Carolina
2007-08-30

Rachel Andoga

Davidson welcomes five new assistant professors into tenure-track positions this semester. Here are  profiles of their careers and academic interests.

Caroline Beschea-Fache, a native of northern France, joins the French Department as a specialist in Métissage, the study of biracialism, multiracialism, and diversity as applied to literature, social studies, and political science. Her research and teaching interests also include modern Francophone literature, cinema, and the construction of identity in France for immigrants. Beschea-Fache holds a master’s degree in movie translation from the University of Lille, where she also completed her undergraduate work. In 2000, she began her pursuit of a master’s degree in French at Indiana University, where she wrote her dissertation on the representation of biracial characters in Francophone literature…

Read the entire article here.

Francophone Women: Between Visibility and Invisibility

Peter Lang Publishing Group
2010
146 pages
Hardback ISBN 978-1-4331-0803-7

Edited by

Cybelle H. McFadden, Assistant Professor of French
University of North Carolina, Greensboro

Sandrine F. Teixidor, Assistant Professor of French Studies
Randolph-Macon College, Ashland, Virginia

Francophone Women: Between Visibility and Invisibility underscores the writing of authors who foreground the female body and who write across geographical borders, as part of a global literary movement that has the French language as its common denominator. This edited collection exposes how female authors portray the tensions that exist between visibility and invisibility, public and private, presence and absence, and excess and restraint when it is linked to femininity and the female body.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Preface

1. Corporeal Performance and Visible Gender Position in Colette’s The Pure and the Impure. Marion Krauthaker
2. After-Images of Muslim Women: Vision, Voice, and Resistance in the Work of Assia Djebar. Mary Ellen Wolf
3. The Gaze beneath the Veil: Portrait of Women in Algeria and Morocco. Sandrine F. Teixidor
4. Vision, Voice, and the Female Body: Nina Bouraoui’s Sites/Sights of Resistance. Adrienne Angelo
5. The Métis Body: Double Mirror. Caroline Beschea-Fache
6. The Body, Sexuality, and the Photo in L’Usage de la photo. Cybelle H. McFadden

Contributors
Index

From: The Métis Body: Double Mirror

DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM? I AM THE ONE YOU CAN’T LEAVE ALONE.  The one who puzzles you, intrigues you.  I am the original definition of “exotic.” Acceptable in many ways, the cafe au lait of life, more palatable because I am diluted…  They call me white, they call me black… they’ve called me everything in between.
Camille Hernandez-Ramdwar

In their novels Garçon manqué (2000) and 53cm (1999), Nina Bouraoui and Sandrine Bessora, respectively, portray characters born of parents belonging to different racialized groups and raise the issues defining métissage.  As they form corporeal representation of the concept, they describe the métis experience in the Francophone context.  The complexity of defining the concept of métissage involves examining both races, since they shape the perception of the métis by the Other and by the subject itself; it also entails discussing the racial tensions that play out in corporeal ways.  Using the work of Bouraoui and Bessora, I will analyze how the conception of a world based on dichotomies and binary oppositions, reinforced by racial categorization, affects and disturbs the construction of métis identities in the texts…