Simone de Beauvoir and the Colonial Experience: Freedom, Violence, and Identity

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Simone de Beauvoir and the Colonial Experience: Freedom, Violence, and Identity interprets the philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir and her intellectual trajectory through the perspective of French colonial history. Nathalie Nya considers Beauvoir through this lens not only to critique her position as a colonizer woman or colon, but also as a means of situating her in one of Frances most vexing and fraught historical moments. This terminology emphasizes the weight of French colonialism on Beauvoirs identity as a white French woman, as well as the subjective and interpersonal dialectic of colonialism. Nya argues that while the French republic was systematizing colonialism, all of its white citizens were colons whereas natives from Frances colonies were the colonized.Simone de Beauvoir and the Colonial Experience presents a gendered and female perspective of French colonialism between 1946 and 1962, a time when French intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Franz Fanon rallied against the political system, and which ultimately brought about an end to French colonialism. It adheres to a reading of Beauvoir as foremost an intellectual woman, one who reflected upon the legacy of French colonialism as an author and whose nation-bound status as a colonizer played a role in the alliance she created with Gisele Halimi and Djamila Boupacha. Beauvoirs colonial reflections can help us to better gauge how womenWhite, Asian, Arab, Caribbean, Latina, mixed race, and Blackdecipher the crimes and injustices of French colonialism.

Reviews

Simone de Beauvoir and the Colonial Experience: Freedom, Violence, and Identity is an essential contribution to both feminist and postcolonial philosophies. The book reclaims Beauvoirs well-deserved place in discussions of the French colonial question. By reading The Second Sex and some of Beauvoirs other works as both feminist and colonial texts, the author presents a sophisticated analysis of Beauvoirs writings and activism related to French colonialism. The most significant accomplishment of the project is the ways in which it brings questions of gender to the fore in relation to race and colonialism. The analysis of the complicated but mostly underresearched question of the relationship between the colonizer women and the colonized women also presents fruitful avenues for feminist and postcolonial philosophies. The author explores one of these avenues in the section Toward an Inclusive Beauvoirian Scholarship by showing how these discussions bear on contemporary transnational feminist coalitions. -- Deniz Durmus, John Carroll University
During the Algerian War, Simone de Beauvoir contended that as a French citizen she was a colonizer, an unwilling beneficiary of French crimes in northern Africa. Distinguishing between her legacy for anti-racist politics in countries shaped by slavery like the United States and those shaped by empire such as France, Nathalie Nya boldly draws the consequences of Beauvoir's colonial self-understanding. This innovative and thought-provoking monograph astutely assesses Beauvoirs critique of liberal rights, her belief that oppression can suffocate moral agency or alleviate moral responsibility, and her ambivalence regarding revolutionary violence from the standpoint of women of color during Beauvoir's lifetime and today. By comparing Beauvoir to Francophone thinkers from the Caribbean and Africa who were her contemporaries, such as Paulette Nardal and Frantz Fanon, Nya adds to our understanding of Beauvoir as an independent political thinker and reminds readers that just as intersectionality may not have the same meaning in all historical contexts, race is philosophically important for reasons that go beyond its implications for white agency and responsibility. -- Laura Hengehold, Professor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, USA
Nyas de-colonial reading of Beauvoir is a fundamental rethink of the politics of existential feminism. The book elucidates the tension between Beauvoirs situation as White colon and her engagement with colonial women of color. Nyas work is an important part of the vital strain of existentialist thought that critically examines race, gender, and empire from the embodied perspective of women of color. -- T Storm Heter, professor, director of the Frederick Douglass Institute for Intercultural Studies, East Stroudsburg University

Author Bio

Nathalie Nya teaches in the Department of Philosophy at John Carroll University.