From Difference to Differences: Reviewing Theories of Women’s Autobiography and Contextualizing the Concept of Métissage

Year 2022, Issue: 1, 35 - 46, 21.02.2022

Shirin Akter Popy

Abstract

As a self–referential genre, autobiography explores the relationship between the “self” of the narrator
and the “self” in the world. Based on this explication of “self,” theorists of autobiography differ. Autobiography
flourished in the West from the Westerner’s belief in the concept of the Renaissance individual that takes its
inception in the Cartesian philosophy, which correlates “self” with “the thinking subject,” capable of producing
meaning, knowledge, and truth. From this humanist look, while the male critics like George Gusdorf, James
Olney read autobiography as a journey towards a self-understanding of the subject as individual and unique,
women critics find the “self” split and textually produced. The present paper focuses on how women started
voicing the difference of female subjectivity in terms of gender experience and how considering the context of
race, gender, class, sexuality, location, and many other hallmarks, postmodern critics advanced towards
articulating the “poetics of differences”. Moreover, reading Francois Lionnet’s concept of métissage in relation
to other postmodern theories of women’s autobiography, the paper argues métissage as the culmination of
theorizing differences regarding subjectivity and representation strategy

Keywords

Renaissance Individual, Relational Subject, Poetics of Differences, Métissage, Francois Lionnet

References

• Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981.
• Blackburn, Regina. “In Search of the Black Female Self: African American Women’s Autobiographies and Ethnicity.” in Women’s Autobiography: Essays in Criticism. Ed. Estelle C. Jelinek. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1980. 133-148.
• Braxton, Joanne M. Black Women Writing Autobiography: A Tradition within a Tradition. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1989.
• Carby, Hazel V. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987.
• Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkeley: U of California P, 1978.
• Corngold, Stanley. The Fate of the Self: German Writers in French Theory. New York: Colombia UP, 1986.
• DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. Writing beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth Century Women Writers. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985.
• Foster, Francis Smith. Witnessing Slavery: The Development of the Ante-bellum Slave Narratives. Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1979.
• Friedman, Susan Stanford. “Women’s Autobiographical Selves: Theory and Practice.” in Women, Autobiography Theory: A Reader. Eds. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. Madison: The U of Wisconsin P, 1998. 72-82.
• Genovese, Elizabeth Fox. “My Statue My Self: Autobiographical Writings of Afro-American Women.” in The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings. Ed. Shari Benstock. North Carolina: The U of North Carolina P, 1988. 63-89.
• Glissant, Edouard. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Trans. J. Michael Dash. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1989.
• Gusdorf, Georges. “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography.” in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Ed. Trans. James Olney. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1980. 28-48. Hooks, Bell. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. New York: Routledge, 2015.
• Holquist, Michael. “Introduction.” In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Ed. Michael
• Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981.
• Jelinek, Estelle C., Ed. Women’s Autobiography: Essays in Criticism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1980.
• Krupat, Arnold. “Native American Autobiography and the Synecdochic Self.” in American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect. Ed. Paul John. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1991. 171-94.
• Lionnet , Francois. Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture. New York: Cornell UP, 1989. Long, Judy. Telling Woman’s Lives: Subject/Narrator/ Reader/ Text. New York: NYUP, 1999.
• Mason, Mary G. “The Other Voice: Autobiographies of Women Writers.” in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Ed. James Olney. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1980. 207-35.
• McKay, Nellie Y. “The Narrative Self: Race, Politics, and Culture in Black American Women’s Autobiography.” in Women, Autobiography Theory: A Reader. Eds. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. Madison: The U of Wisconsin P, 1998. 96-107.
• Miller, J. Hillis. “‘Herself Against Herself’: The Clarification of Clara Middleton.” in The Representation of Women in Fiction. Ed. Carolyn G. Heibrun and Margaret R. Hogonnet. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1983. 98-123.
• Moore, David L. “Myth, History, and Identity in Silko and Young Bear: Postcolonial Praxis.” in New Voices in Native American Literary Criticism. Ed. Arnold Krupat. Washington. DC: Smithsonian Institution P, 1993. 370-95.
• Neuman, Shirley. “From Different Poetics to a Poetics of Differences.” in Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice. Ed. Marlene Kadar. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1992. 213-30.
• Olney, James. “Autobiography and the Cultural Moment: A Thematic, Historical, and Bibliographical Introduction.” in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Princeton UP, 1980. 3-27.
• ———. Metaphors of Self: The Meanings of Autobiography. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1972.
• Pedersen, Isabel. “Métissage and the Emancipation of the Postcolonial Autobiographical Self in Austin Clarke’s Growing Up Stupid Under the Union Jack.” Wascana Review 35.1 (2000): 10-21.
• Peterson, Linda H. “Review: Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body: Women’s Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth Century by Sidonie Smith.” Biography 17. 4. (Fall 1994): 405-8. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/23539592>.
• Rowbotham, Sheila. Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World. Baltimore: Penguin, 1973.
• Smith, Sidonie. A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-representation. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987.
• ———. Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body: Women’s Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth Century. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993.
• Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson, Eds. Decolonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1992.
• ———. “Introduction: Situating Subjectivity in Women’s Autobiographical Practices.” in Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader. Madison. Eds. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson: The U of Wisconsin P, 1998. 3-56.
• Spacks , Patricia Ann Meyer. The Female Imagination. New York: Knopf. 1975.
• Stanley, Liz. Autobiographical I: Theory and Practice of Feminist Auto/Biography. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1992.
• Stanton, Domna C. “Autogynography: Is the Subject Different?” in The Female Autograph: Theory and Practice of Autobiography from the Tenth to the Twentieth Century. Ed. Domna C. Stanton. New York: New York Literary Forum, 1984.
• Thompson , John B. Studies in the Theory of Ideology. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984.
• Watson, Julia. “Toward an Anti-Metaphysics of Autobiography.” in The Culture of Autobiography: Constructions of Self-representation. Ed. Robert Folkenflik. California: Stanford UP, 1993. 57-124.
• Truth, Sojourner. “Ain’t I a Woman.” Speech delivered at the 1851 Women’s Convention in Ohio. <https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/185/civil-rights-and-conflict-in-the-united-states-selected-speeches/3089/aint-ia-woman/>.
• Weintraub, Karl. The Values of the Individual Self and Circumstance in Autobiography. Illinois: U of Chicago P, 1978.
• Wong, Hertha Sweet. “First-Person Plural: Subjectivity and Community.” in Women, Autobiography Theory: A Reader. Ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. Madison: The U of Wisconsin P, 1998. 168-82.
• Young, Iris Marion. “Impartiality and the Civil Public: Some Implications of Feminist Critiques of Moral and Political Theory.” in Feminism as Critique: Essays on the Politics of Gender in Late-Capitalist Societies. Ed. Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell. Oxford: Oxford Polity Press, 1987. 56-76.