ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 considers ontological questions raised by the thematisation of being (mis)recognised as “the stranger” – notably language, ideologies and institutions which determine who belongs in French space. Sandrine Bessora van Nguema (penname Bessora), a Paris-based author of (Afroeuropean) Gabonese and Swiss descent, describes herself as a “geographically variable” – errant – subject. Through an analysis of her autofictional novel, 53cm (1999), I craft an intersectional feminist critique of the “sighting” of black women's bodies as “non-normative” by engaging the narrative's dialogue with the hautological figure of Sara Baartman. This interrogates the gaze as a site for producing racialised knowledge about who belongs where and maps the city through an absurd quest of residency or “place” in France. As a “would-be” flâneuse, criss-crossing between state institutions on the metro, the author's fictional avatar describes herself as a “gaulologue” (a neologism for an ethnographer specialising in the study of Gallic people). Using the bell hooks' conception of the “oppositional gaze”, I argue that the staging of the “geographically variable” Afropeuropean subject as being “lost” in the heterotopic space of French bureaucracy, constitutes a sophisticated critique of the colonial “ethnographic gaze” continues to locate blackness outside the space of “the norm”.
