At their best, narratives of individual lives transport us to other ages and permit us to see the world through other eyes. The films and novels reviewed in this issue are narratives of individual lives in the 18^th and 20^th centuries, which are united by a common determination to explore how their protagonists struggle with the experience of being marginalized. Indeed, some of the protagonists of the fictions reviewed here are doubly marginalized—by race, gender, nationality, or class—and no two challenge their condition in the same way. In the end, fictions that successfully depict individual struggle and attend to the unique constraints or horrors of the era in which that struggle takes place, can sharpen readers’ or viewers’ appreciation of our own assumptions and perhaps enhance our sense of empathy. When a fiction fails to clear those hurdles, a good reviewer can compensate by illuminating why it fails and what we may yet learn.

We begin with essays about two prize-winning novels. Elodie Silberstein reviews Gisèle Pineau’s most recent fiction, Ady, Soleil Noir, an account of the life of Adrienne Fidelin, a woman of color in 20^th-century hexagonal France who was a professional dancer, a model for photographers and surrealist painters, and briefly the lover of Man Ray. In her wide-ranging reflection on Pineau’s novel, Silberstein explores the author’s vivid, sympathetic rendering of Ady’s subjective experience and frames it with an account of the cultural erasure, reclamation, and endurance of Black female artists across more than two centuries. Richard Fogarty writes about David Diop’s hallucinatory Frère d’âme/ At Night All Blood is Black, which imagines the experience of a tirailleur sénégalais driven mad by the violence of trench warfare and racist stereotyping during WWI. Exploring the central themes of Diop’s book, Fogarty deepens our understanding by explicitly linking the barbarism of European warfare to the savagery that Europeans simultaneously imposed upon and imputed to Africans.

Neither of the films reviewed here have the inherent strengths of Pineau’s and Diop’s novels, but their critics make each the occasion for sustained reflection on historical representation. Tracy Adams and Christine Adams find historical resonance in Maiwenn’s biopic Jeanne du Barry (2023) that the director might not have expected, noting that this representation of Louis XV’s mistress might well have been drawn from an18th-century libelle. The reviewers not only set the historical record straight but suggest what we might learn in the 21^st century from a film maker who showed herself more willing to give voice to the unique political, social, and gendered tensions of the 18^th century. Finally, Christy Pichichero offers an object lesson in mining the offensive for riches in her critique of Chevalier (2022), which claims to represent the life of the 18^th-century mixed-race composer, violinist, and military commander, the Chevalier de Saint-George. Although that film purports to recover Saint-George’s life for a post-Black Lives Matters world, Pichichero finds it replete with stale racist stereotypes. She follows up this acute cultural critique with generous explanation of where we might find better accounts of the Chevalier’s life and achievements until a more imaginative film maker comes along.

Reviews

• Portrait of a Complex Woman: Gisèle Pineau’s Ady, soleil noir by Elodie Silberstein, Pace University
• Birth Brothers: David Diop’s Vision of Darkness and Blood on the Western Front by Richard S. Fogarty, University at Albany, SUNY
• History with the Politics Left Out: Maïwenn Le Besco’s Jeanne du Barry (2023) by Tracy Adams, University of Auckland, New Zealand and Christine Adams, St. Mary’s College of Maryland
• Images and Imaginaries of Black Atlantic History: Chevalier and Joseph Bologne, the Chevalier de Saint-George by Christy Pichichero, George Mason University