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Downloaded from Bjabrill.Com09/27/202110026 01:27:50AM Via Free Access 2 Mcweeny Simone de Beauvoir Studies 31 (2020) 1–16 brill.com/sdbs Editor’s Introduction / Présentation du numéro Jennifer McWeeny Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, MA, USA [email protected] The year 2020 is carving out a singular place in history, like 1939 or 1968. This is a time when current events weigh so heavily on existing structures that their supports have buckled, laying bare inefficacy and injustice just beneath the sur- face. In the midst of a global pandemic and the rise of diverse social movements protesting the unequal distribution of bodily vulnerability according to race, gender, class, and other social locations, the weaknesses inherent in our gov- ernments, healthcare systems, economies, and societies stamp our lived expe- rience with in-sight—a seeing from within the historical moment as it unfolds. That the number 2020 evokes the name for optic clarity relative to a cer- tain distance is thus fitting. With this new year, we encounter the urgency of our existential condition with 20/20 vision. The number is also a doubled one (“twenty-twenty”), an appropriate sign of the duplicitous perception common to the social media of our extended, electronic minds, where power struggles between competing political camps surround us with rhetoric, propaganda, and lies that look a lot like truth.1 Such features of our era implicate a moment of repetition—20 followed by 20—a reprise of prior histories, a twinning of spaces and times. The 2020s, like the 1920s, have come with a roar and have so far lived up to the label “les années folles” (the crazy years), albeit in a manner different from that of its namesake a century ago. This is Deleuzian “repeti- tion with a difference,” the concept at the center of his book published in 1968, when protests against capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism erupted across France, the United States, and other countries.2 1 The phenomenon of “double vision” or “duplicitous perception” is double-edged in that it is a strategy that can be employed both in the service of oppression and resistance. See María Lugones, “Boomerang Perception and the Colonizing Gaze: Ginger Reflections on Horizon- tal Hostility,” in Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions, Lanham, MD, Rowman & Littlefield, 2003, 151–164, pp. 156, 159, 162–163. María’s presence is one of the many great losses of 2020. 2 Gilles Deleuze, Difference & Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, New York, Columbia University Press, 1994 [1968]. © International Simone de Beauvoir Society, 2020 | doi:10.1163/25897616-Downloaded from bjaBrill.com09/27/202110026 01:27:50AM via free access 2 mcweeny Like our lived experiences, this second volume of the relaunched Simone de Beauvoir Studies, volume 31, is imprinted with the date 2020. The current issue is distinctive because it is the first “standard issue” of the new instan- tiation of the journal. The inaugural volume, volume 30, published in 2019, consists of two special issues: “The New Face of Simone de Beauvoir Studies / Études sur Beauvoir: un nouveau regard” (SdBS 30.1) and “Beauvoir in Con- versation / Dialogues avec Beauvoir” (SdBS 30.2). Whereas texts included in special issues are selected in virtue of their capacity to speak to a predeter- mined theme, those that comprise standard issues are considered on an indi- vidual basis, so their themes emerge retrospectively, after the texts have been grouped together. A standard issue shows us which questions are foremost in the minds of individual scholars of our era and which patterns repeat across discrete writings from different disciplines and cultural landscapes. In this way, the collection of texts that comprise this issue “reflect an epoch which [seeks] to know itself.”3 Two thematic threads are especially prominent among the introductory matter, articles, book reviews, and interview featured in this issue. First, whether literary, historical, political, or philosophical, each text prioritizes first-person experience and situates that experience in relation to particular social and historical locations occupied by both authors and readers, such as White, Black, French, American, Muslim, Western, non-Western, neocolo- nial, and trans identities. Second, these texts highlight parts of Beauvoir’s oeu- vre that have been historically underexplored or misrepresented in the schol- arly literature, such as her relationships with Richard Wright and Djamila Boupacha, her relevance to the fields of transgender studies and posthuman studies, her analysis of biology in The Second Sex, her conceptions of literary genres, and her student and travel diaries, memoirs, and unpublished manu- scripts. Following a tradition begun with volume 30, the Simone de Beauvoir Studies Featured Translation / Traduction annuelle is placed as the lead article of the volume. This year’s honoree is Margaret A. Simons, whose groundbreaking 1998/1999 essay titled “Richard Wright and Simone de Beauvoir” was trans- lated into French by Marine Rouch.4 That Simons has written a text capable of 3 Simone de Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance, trans. Richard Howard, New York, Penguin Books, 1987 [1963], p. 55. Subsequent references to this work are indicated by the abbreviation fce. 4 Margaret A. Simons, “Richard Wright and Simone de Beauvoir: From the Black Metropolis to Simone de BeauvoirDownloaded Studies from 31Brill.com09/27/2021 (2020) 1–16 01:27:50AM via free access editor’s introduction / présentation du numéro 3 shifting the entire field of Beauvoir scholarship while also speaking to wider issues of equity and inclusion in the academy will likely come as no surprise to SdBS readers. In 1983, Simons published the landmark article “The Silencing of Simone de Beauvoir: Guess What’s Missing from The Second Sex,” a study that both exposed sexist reading strategies prominent in the academy and ignited the drive to reclaim Beauvoir’s rightful place as a philosopher that has been a primary focus of American and Anglophone academic writing for the past three decades.5 Though it is no less groundbreaking than “The Silencing of Simone de Beau- voir,” Simons’s essay about the erasure of Richard Wright’s influence on Euro- pean thought has yet to receive the same attention in our field. In both cases, Simons shows how the sex and race of each thinker—that Beauvoir is a White woman and Wright is a Black man—comes to bear on their places in national imaginaries and disciplinary canons. As Simons explains, “Ces éléments remet- tent en question la vision d’une philosophie seulement créée par les hommes blancs européens mais aussi celle qui postule que RichardWright, écrivain émi- gré, fut passivement influencé par la philosophie française et n’exerça aucune influence sur les intellectuel.le.s française.e.s.” (This evidence challenges the view that philosophy is only the creation of white European men and that Richard Wright, an émigré writer, was a passive recipient of French philosoph- ical influence, exerting no influence himself on French intellectuals.)6 In “Simone de Beauvoir, Richard Wright et Le Deuxième Sexe,” Simons sit- uates concepts of race and sex in relation to particular, first-person accounts of these locations and argues that Beauvoir’s theory of women’s oppression in The Second Sex is indebted to Wright’s theory of racial oppression. The two authors first met in person in 1947 while Beauvoir was visiting the United States, although she had readWright’s work as early as 1940 and published a number of his stories in the first issues of Les Temps Modernes from 1945 to 1947.7 This 1947 the City of Lights,” Drum Voices Review, vol. 8, no. 1–2, 1998/1999, pp. 122–135. The essay was revised and reprinted under the title “Richard Wright, Simone de Beauvoir, and The Second Sex,” in Simons’s book, Beauvoir and “The Second Sex”: Feminism, Race, and the Origins of Exis- tentialism, Lanham, MD, Rowman & Littlefield, 2000, pp. 167–184. 5 Margaret A. Simons, “The Silencing of Simone de Beauvoir: Guess What’s Missing from The Second Sex,” Women’s Studies International Forum, vol. 6, no. 5, 1983, pp. 559–564. 6 The English translation of this passage can be found in Simons, Beauvoir and “The Second Sex,” p. 183. 7 Richard Wright, “Le feu dans la nuée, i–ii” (“Fire and Cloud”), trans. Marcel Duhamel, Les Temps Modernes, no. 1, October 1945, pp. 22–47; no. 2, November 1945, pp. 291–319; “Débuts à Chicago” (“The Man Who Went to Chicago”), trans. Marcel Duhamel, Les Temps Mod- ernes, no. 11–12, August–September 1946, pp. 464–497; Black Boy, i–vi (Black Boy), trans. Mar- Simone de Beauvoir Studies 31 (2020) 1–16 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 01:27:50AM via free access 4 mcweeny meeting in NewYork,Simons argues, would prove crucial to the development of Beauvoir’s mature philosophy. At this time, Beauvoir became especially atten- tive to the distinction between assuming a third-person objective perspective on the problem of race, exemplified in Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma, and expressing first-person, autobiographical accounts of the lived experience of Blackness in the ways that Wright does in Native Son and Black Boy.8 She was inspired by Wright’s approach, and would eventually employ a similar method in relation to woman’s situation in the second book of The Second Sex.9 Returning to Simons’s study in 2020, in the wake of the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, and global protests on behalf of the Black Lives Matter movement, is especially timely in light of its empha- sis on the silencing and erasure of Black voices and lineages.10 Furthermore, Simons’s essay helps us to form coalitions between different social movements across time and space, from antiracist politics to radical feminism, from Black Lives Matter to #MeToo, and from the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s to the globalized, but fragmented political economies of the 2020s.
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