As she tries to collect them for an essay she is planning to write, other women''s words begin interfering in Clara Schulmann''s life - heard on the radio, in podcasts, songs, and films; words of novelists, feminist intellectuals, friends or strangers overheard in the street. They invade her psyche, reshaping the essay that she once had in mind into a picaresque adventure which investigates the fault lines around women''s voices: and in particular those moments of overflow and excess where wayward words take seed. Chicanes heralds a new French feminism through a meticulously orchestrated chorus of the wildest female voices, from figures in the history of feminist writing to the stranger on the street, blurring the boundaries between body and art; personal and political. A poly-translation, by eight female translators, from established to emerging, Chicanes brings the individual voice of each translator into subtle relief.
Industry Reviews
'This is a book to treasure and love.' - Deborah Levy; 'In this beautiful and original book, Clara Schulmann reflects on the voices of women. She has assembled a dazzling 'cacophony', varying in rhythm, rapidity, hesitation and flow, from a wide range of fascinating and unexpected sources. Chicanes captures the sounds of women's emotions; the perfectly expressed, the overflow of excess and the lapse into silence. Schulmann's own voice is a vivid presence, inspiring readers, as they discover the words of other women who enliven her pages, to summon up their own treasured voices.' - Laura Mulvey; 'This essay addresses the matters of affect and unease, inviting reflection on the voice as a tool for the emancipation of the body. Through Clara Schulmann's sensibility, the words of women who speak up start disrupting the tedium of routine and wreak havoc.' - Critique d'art; '[Zizanies] reads like a thriller (...) an idiosyncratic collage, born of the critical examination of the things the author both reads and hears. In just over 200 pages, Schulmann spans a vast imaginary community; bringing together innumerable feminist figures - from the well-known to the unrecorded, to the unexpected. (...) Situating the act of expression is at the centre of Schulmann's project, convinced as she is of the need to include the colours of emotion, words' occasional fragility and awkwardness, and the constant gentle curiosity that motivate her research in the articulation of her thoughts and ideas. The aim is to free herself from the constraints of academic writing and to find a freer hybrid form, while still preserving the richness and precision of her references.' - The Art Newspaper; 'A veritable mille-feuille of moods, allusions and digressions' - Switch; 'Writing gives [Schulmann] the chance to reflect on the voice's physical vibration, in order to discuss its fragility, emotion, inflections, or its hesitations. On a more fundamental level, the modularity of the voice is understood here as the sign or the symptom of women's condition, a sign whose existence, for a long time, was intentionally ignored. Over the course of the book, Chicanes, conceived as a series of fragments, depicts an emotional and intellectual landscape shaped by feminism while allowing the author's own personal journey to show through.' - Issue; 'Written in the first person, we find [in Chicanes], through a series of fragments, a polyphony of personal situations narrated by voices 'thinking out loud'. These fragments are mingled with other texts and podcasts, mapping out a cartography of thinkers who play out, through the prism of intimacy, the 'affective turn' of the social sciences and academic writing in gender studies. As they move away from a linear narrative of technique and knowledge, they leave behind the clear language of rationality experienced in full light and, in its wake, something else is heard like a voice in the night, full of silences, ramblings, hesitations and stutterings.' - Zerodeux /02 magazine
