Cécile Bishop

I work on postcolonial francophone literatures and visual culture, with a particular emphasis on the Caribbean, sub-Saharan Africa, and the representation of race in French culture.

My first book, Postcolonial Criticism and Representations of African Dictatorship: The Aesthetics of Tyranny, was published by Legenda in 2014. Questioning the politicized rhetoric of much postcolonial criticism, this book argues that privileging political interpretations of literature has paradoxically engendered a new formalism. Through a selection of contemporary works in French and in English, ranging across literature, film and social science, I explore the conflicting interests that motivate our encounters with depictions of dictatorship, proposing a concept of aesthetic experience that includes not only an investment in literary or artistic form but also our referential impulses towards extra-textual realities.

Pursuing my investigation into aesthetics and postcolonial politics, my current book project, Forms of Blackness, reexamines the question of race in France in both written and visual representations. In this book, I examine the technical, stylistic and material devices, as well as the interpretive practices that encode blackness into a recognizable, visible identity. Proceeding through a combination of interpretations and experiments, I aim to reveal the potential of the aesthetic to produce new reflections and visions.