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Abstract
This article interrogates the bizarre disjunction between the loosely-linked tales of Marie NDiaye's 2009 bestseller Trois femmes puissantes and the manner in which they have been marketed as a single, coherent, realistic novel about "strong African women". This deformation by the market has made NDiaye's previously more complex and oblique - but less economically viable - evocations of racialized "difference" somehow culturally digestible. Trois femmes puissantes, by being spectacularly hung on a largely imaginary hook named "Africa", lends itself to a cliché-ridden, neo-colonialist discourse, and is accordingly misrepresented, exoticized and commodified at every turn. Any genuine puissance the text itself might wield has been neutralized, sucked dry, and "dumbed down" by the powerful machine that is the Debordian "spectacle" of capitalist hegemony.
Le travailleur ne se produit pas lui-même, il produit une puissance indépendante. Le succès de cette production, son abondance, revient vers le producteur comme abondance de la dépossession. Tout le temps et l'espace de son monde lui deviennent étrangers avec l'accumulation de ses produits aliénés. Le spectacle est la carte de ce nouveau monde, carte qui recouvre exactement son territoire. Les forces mêmes qui nous ont échappé se montrent à nous dans toute leur puissance.
- Guy Debord, La Société du spectacle
Introduction
Marie NDiaye's 2009 novel Trois femmes puissantes, a triptych of stories loosely stitched together using the enticing but largely illusory threads of "women", "Africa" and puissance, marked the then 42-year-old author's passage into literary superstardom.1 The highest-selling French novel of the year - it had by 2010 shifted a remarkable 450,000 copies2-the book was also awarded France's most prestigious literary prize, the Prix Goncourt. NDiaye's prior career as novelist, playwright and screenwriter could hardly be considered, of course, to have been mediocre, and she remains, for many readers (myself included), simply the most important figure to emerge in French fiction for decades.3 Her first novel, Quant au riche avenir, was published by Les Editions de Minuit in 1985 when she was just 17, and she went on, in a succession of dazzling literary accomplishments, to prove herself as truly the best in show, at least as far as the critics were concerned. Following a prestigious Académie Française bursary in 1987 to study at the Villa Medicis in Rome,...