This dissertation investigates how the genres of literary fiction and performance represent women's bodies and explore their knowledges and traces of embodied knowledge. It places side by side eight contemporary novels and short stories and two plays written and performed by women of color which seek to rethink (post)colonial histories and legacies: (North and West) Africa, the Caribbean and France. In the first part of the dissertation, I analyze two pioneering women authors, Assia Djebar and Maryse Cond©♭, who revisit their genealogies erased by colonization to gather traces of their female ancestors' existence. In the second part, I explore second generations authors Marie NDiaye and L©♭onora Miano whose characters relentlessly try to move forward from colonial scars to forge new identities. In the third part, I bring out how women's Afro-descendant performances in Eva Doumbia's and Ahmed Madani's theaters help black and brown women move past (post)colonial scars by performing and rehearsing their identities. The realities described in the novels and performances are often of personal experiences with (neo)colonial and contemporary oppression and racism, which leads to reconsiderations of questions of cultural identity. This dissertation theorizes feminine creativities, experiences and embodied knowledges as keys to unlocking the meanings of Afro-descendant women's literature and performance. Ultimately, the women writers and artists I analyze in my dissertation write from lived and imagined experiences and are able to re-frame these narratives of victimhood and hypersexualization and remedy their erasure from History and contemporary media landscapes. In the absence of a French civil rights movement that would force us to confront such issues, these authors, playwrights, actresses, and filmmakers challenge us to question our current understanding of diasporic and feminine experiences both within France and in its former colonies and overseas departments.