Conflict Bodies: The Politics of Rape Representation in the Francophone Imaginary explores the relationship between rape and narratives of violence in francophone literature and
culture. The book offers ways to account for the raped bodies beneath the conflicts of slavery, genocide, dictatorship, natural disasters and warand to examine why doing so is necessary.
Through a feminist analysis of the rhetoric and representation of rape in francophone African and Caribbean cultural production,Conflict Bodies examines theoretical, visual, and
literary texts that challenge the dominant views of postcolonial violence. Using an interdisciplinary and comparative framework to consider different contextsHaiti, Guadeloupe, Rwanda, and
Democratic Republic of the CongoRégine Michelle Jean-Charles illuminates how analyzing survivors’ subjectivities, stories, and embodied experiences provides a nuanced understanding of what is
at stake in rape representation. Referencing theories from francophone literary studies, transnational black feminisms, and rape cultural criticism to analyze novels, film, photography,
drama, and documentaries, Jean-Charles argues that in today’s global climatewhere one in three women worldwide has been raped, rape is being used as a tool of war, and rape myths circulate
with vehemencetraditional scripts of violence” that fail to account for sexual violence demand refusal, re-thinking, and re-imagining.
