Art and politics in Duras' "India cycle"

Lucy Stone McNeece proposes a political reading of six of Marguerite Duras' works, centering on a single narrative core as an allegory of the neocolonial politics of representation. She argues that Duras speaks about her past in colonial Indochina both to establish an analogy between bankrupt colonial structures of the 1930s and the post-modern media culture of modern France and to alert her readers to the invisible oppression within the liberal democracies of Western Europe. Using two settings - India in the 1930s and northern France in the 1970s - Duras examines the vestiges of colonial attitudes and exclusionary, racist practices in contemporary culture and reveals the hidden structures that perpetuate these practices. The cycle, McNeece suggests, dramatizes the possibilities of representation, of reconstructing the real - connected to the dream of territorial and cultural appropriation - as a problem of language. The cycle thus demonstrates that the real is in some ways only a creation of conventions of language/culture itself. McNeece's study extends previous work on Duras by setting her work in a larger framework than that of psychoanalysis or feminism and focusing on the connections in her work between poetics and sociopolitical concerns.