Uncovering Adrienne Fidelin
In her 2021 novel Ady, soleil noir, Guadeloupean author Gisèle Pineau draws on her imaginative and historical skills to reimagine the life and subjectivity of Adrienne Fidelin (1915–2004), a Guadeloupean dancer in 1930s Paris and a little-known muse, model, and lover of American photographer Man Ray...
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| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Liverpool University Press
2022-12-01
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| Series: | Francosphères |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/10.3828/franc.2022.17 |
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| Summary: | In her 2021 novel Ady, soleil noir, Guadeloupean author Gisèle Pineau draws on her imaginative and historical skills to reimagine the life and subjectivity of Adrienne Fidelin (1915–2004), a Guadeloupean dancer in 1930s Paris and a little-known muse, model, and lover of American photographer Man Ray. Winner of the 2021 Prix du roman historique, the book offers a compelling interpretation of how Fidelin, staged as the first-person narrator ‘Ady’, may have understood her identity among artists of the avant-garde milieu and as a woman of colour within the context of 1930s Paris. This article examines the ‘disorderly’ subjectivity of the novel’s narrator-protagonist, to adopt Kaiama Glover’s term, arguing that she negotiates the challenges underpinning her status as a woman of colour in Western avant-garde culture and, in doing so, chooses to prioritize her own selfhood. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0. |
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| ISSN: | 2046-3820 2046-3839 |