Intimate Colonialism

Laurie Charlés finished her Ph.D., then took off to West Africa as a Peace Corps volunteer. Asked to create programs to help adolescent girls stay in school, she found herself enmeshed in the politics and cultural barriers that prevent these girls from creating a better life. But that was not all that was enmeshed. Charlés found love, sexual fulfillment, sexual harassment, and gender discrimination, all of which further complexified her stated mission. Her candid assessment of life and work in Africa, the intimate relationships that gave hope to the possibility of change, the emotional and physical highs and lows that affected her ability to function, all become factors affecting her success in improving the lives of African girls. This eloquent narrative should be of interest both to those doing development work and to those interested in autoethnographic exploration of the self.

Laurie L. Charlés is an assistant professor of family therapy at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She received her doctorate at Nova Southeastern University in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, in 1999. Her master's degree was conferred at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas, her hometown, in 1993. Charlés is the author of a forthcoming book on crisis (hostage) negotiation discourse, and author or co-author of numerous articles in the field of family therapy qualitative research, practice, and supervision.Charlés' recent work focuses on how systemic family therapists can take a more global, citizen/activist, and human rights perspective to their work. She is currently tracing the migration of her ancestors, Aurelia and Alcario Charlés, to Mexican Texas from Spanish Mexico in 1894, with an emphasis on how mestiza women in Texas have balanced gender expectations throughout the past century.Charlés enjoys talking about patterns of migration across cultures and continents, teaching therapists how to learn from the resilience of people often marginalized as "other," and studying conversations as a way to learn more about the ways we live, love, and work in contemporary society.Her hobbies include traveling in various seas of diversity (Globetrekker-style) with her husband Eric, walking for miles in the city of Boston and then sitting down to a good Italian meal (accompanied by lots of red wine) in the North End, and, most of all, laughing over coffee with her mother whenever she can find time to migrate back to San Antonio.

Introduction; Chapter 1 A Question of Mentalité; Chapter 2 The Little Things That Matter; Chapter 3 One of the Crowd; Chapter 4 Back in the World of Ideas; Chapter 5 Lust, Passion, and Tactical Adoration; Chapter 6 A Change of Future; Chapter 7 Sex, Love, and Other Demanding Parasites; Chapter 8 Diplomacy au Village; Chapter 9 Togo Postscript, Five Years Later; Chapter 10 Constructing an Intimate Text;