unselfing

University of Toronto Press (2022)

Altered states of consciousness – including experiences of deprivation, pain, hallucination, fear, desire, alienation, and spiritual transcendence – can transform the ordinary experience of selfhood.

Unselfing: Global French Literature at the Limits of Consciousness explores the nature of disruptive self experiences and the different shapes they have taken in literary writing. Specifically, it focuses on the tension between rival conceptions of unselfing as either a form of productive self-transcendence or a form of alienating self-loss. Thinking through this opposition helps us understand what is at stake in escaping the ordinary experience of self and reveals how these unusual states foreground aspects of experience that are invisible during ordinary conditions.

Unselfing explores the shapes and meanings of unselfing through the framework of the global French literary world, encompassing texts by modernist figures in France and Belgium alongside writers from Algeria, Rwanda, and Morocco. Together, these diverse texts prompt a re-evaluation of the consequences of the loss or the transcendence of the self. Through a series of close readings, the book offers a new account of the ethical questions raised by altered states and shows how philosophies of empathy can be tested against and often challenged by literary works. She achieves this through creative pairings of texts by Paul Valéry and Charlotte Delbo, Henri Michaux and Yolande Mukagasana, Hélène Cixous and Abdelkébir Khatibi, and Georges Bataille and Simone Weil, revealing the range of the representations of the limits of consciousness across the global French world.

Drawing on cognitive science and phenomenology, Unselfing provides a new methodology for approaching texts that give shape to the fringes of conscious experience.

Autrement

in progress

Autrement: Unnatural Narrative as Radical Philosophy, examines the readerly experience of avant-garde Francophone African and diasporic fictions. This book aims to theorize the role of impossible worlds created in “unnatural” Francophone narratives over the past fifty years, from the decades following independence from French colonial rule to the present. Unnatural narratives, following the work of cognitive narratologists, are narratives that involve metaphysical impossibilities, violate physical laws, or feature characters, temporalities, or spaces which could not exist in the real world. In my project, this means focusing on characters such as the revolutionary who refuses to die in Sony Labou-Tansi’s groundbreaking 1979 novel, La vie et demie, or the deceased migrants who return from their fatal voyage across the Atlantic to possess the bodies of the women they left behind in Mati Diop’s recent film, Atlantique. This book-length project centers on the experiences of unnatural narratives in postcolonial, neocolonial, and diasporic contexts across multiple audiences, publics, and horizons of expectations. It will intervene in ongoing debates on the role of genre in radical philosophy (encompassing categories such as surrealism, science fiction, Afrofuturism, and magical realism) and its relationship to decolonial political objectives (liberation, self determination, and political freedom).