Life Writing in the Long Run: A Smith & Watson Autobiography Studies Reader

The Colonial Subject

Decolonization, of course, refers literally to the actual political processes set in motion in various geographical locations before and during this century. Colonies established under European domination achieved independent statehood, sometimes through peaceful and sometimes through violent struggle. But decolonization remains a problematic notion, a potential disenchantment. Colonial relationships persist today—in Northern Ireland, on the West Bank in Israel, in South Africa, in many other parts of the world. Indigenous colonialisms characterize the relationships among peoples in many countries. Moreover, as communication networks shuttle information instantly around the globe and multinational corporations reorganize the flow of labor, capital, and control across national borders, a process of neocolonization seems to render the earlier achievement of autonomous nationhood almost irrelevant to the circulation of goods, money, and culture.

Yet if we must constantly probe the reach, contradictory strategies, and contested achievements of decolonization, we must also probe the reach of the term colonization. So widespread has become the practice of weaving the word colonization through various critiques of the subject of Western humanism and the politics of representation that the word now seems to signify a universalized descriptor of subjectivity. From a Foucauldian theoretical perspective all “I”s are sites where the generalized operations of power press ineluctably on the subject. From a Lacanian perspective everyone is subjected to and “colonized” by the Law of the Father. In the vogue of a materialist postmodernity, all “I”s, subject to the cultural field of multiple determinations, are colonized through irresistible interpellations. In the midst of this theoretical quagmire, Gayatri Spivak’s provocative query, “Can the subaltern speak?” needs to be opened out.[2] Can any subject speak? Or is every subject “spoken for” and thus “colonized” by processes constitutive of “the human condition,” from the psychological and biological to the economic, political, and discursive?

We have difficulty with such a comprehensive invocation of the concept of colonization, and for a variety of reasons. If decolonization holds out the promise of a change in subjects, so universalized a notion of colonization forecloses that possibility. Because no one can escape the realm of “the subjected,” because decolonization remains a utopian dream, no one set of political actions assumes legitimacy, efficacy, or a prompt utility. The colonized subject is effectively stripped of agency.

Furthermore, however compelling and sophisticated this critique of the subject may be, it is a central instance of the universalizing agenda of Western theorizing that erases the subject’s heterogeneity as well as its agency. This agenda has become increasingly apparent in feminist theories that hypostasize a universally colonized “woman” universally subjected to “patriarchal” oppression. As theorists such as bell hooks, Elizabeth V. Spelman, and Spivak, among others, insist, privileging the oppression of gender over and above other oppressions effectively erases the complex and often contradictory positionings of the subject. The axes of the subject’s identifications and experiences are multiple, because locations in gender, class, race, ethnicity, and sexuality complicate one another, and not merely additively, as Spelman so effectively argues.[3] Nor do different vectors of identification and experience overlap neatly or entirely. One cannot easily sever, separate out, or subsume under one another the strands of multiple determinations. For instance, colonial regimes needed and global economies continue to need “classes” as well as “races” in order to achieve their goals. And class identifications call particular women to specific psychological and cultural itineraries that may collide and/or converge with itineraries of race and nation.

Nor can one be oblivious to the precise location in which the subject is situated. Attention to specific locations leads Spivak to insist that “the situation of the subject(s) of post-modern neo-colonialism must be rigorously distinguished from the situation of immigrants, who are still caught in some way within structures of ‘colonial’ subject production; and, especially, from the historical problem of ethnic oppression on First World soil.”[4]

Moreover, just as there are various colonialisms or systems of domination operative historically, there are various patriarchies operative historically, not one universal “patriarchy.” There are various positions of men toward patriarchy, not just an equivalence among them. As Carolyn Kay Steedman emphasizes in her analysis of the autobiographical storytelling of her working-class mother, her father was neither the patriarch of Lacan’s Law of the Father nor the uncontested and powerful figure at the center of socioeconomic, political, and cultural regimes; he was, like her mother, an outlaw.[5] As there are various positions of specific men (for instance, those enjoying the benefits of hegemonic power, those suffering under the domination of others) to colonial environments, there are differences in the relationships of specific women to those men. Thus domination has different meanings and implications for the “wife,” “daughter,” and “independent woman” of the colonizer and for the “wife,” “daughter,” and “independent woman” of the colonized.

Insistence on an undifferentiated (read normatively white) global “sisterhood” of oppressed women empties the subject of all its “colorfulness”[6] by “colonizing under the sign of the same those differences that might otherwise call that totalizing concept into question.”[7] Since there are always, as Chandra Talpade Mohanty reminds us, “political implications of analytic strategies and principles,”[8] we need to resist the tendency of Western theorizing to install another colonial regime, albeit now a discursive regime that works to contain “colorfulness” inside a Western theoretical territory.

Finally, as scholars of colonialism and imperialism have argued recently, the avant garde taking up of the terms colonization and decolonization by “First World” theorists intent on dislodging the certitudes of the old subject of Western humanism does an injustice to, and effectively occludes, very real colonial practices in specific geographical locations and historical periods.

Although the universally colonized “woman” might be a limiting concept, a concept of colonization too carefully circumscribed, too narrowly applied to specific historical processes and geographical venues, also has its limitations. Certainly the work of historians, sociologists, political theorists, anthropologists, and literary critics must be grounded in the locales and temporalities of specific colonial, postcolonial, and neocolonial experiences. But there has been more colonizing going on in the world than that which took place under the obvious colonial authorities, say, the British Raj or the French and British Protectorates. And there have been, as cultural critics point out, colonies within colonies, oppressions within oppressions. While attention to specific colonial regimes helps us resist certain totalizing tendencies in our theories, thinking broadly about the constitutive nature of subjectivity and precisely about the differential deployments of gendered subjectivity helps us tease out complex and entangled strands of oppression and domination. To this end, for instance, feminist theorists have sometimes invoked theories of gendered subjectivity, sometimes histories of gendered social practices and behaviors, to critique postcolonial theorizing that maintains a masculinist bias by failing to factor issues of gender and sexuality into discussions of colonialist discourses and colonial practices.

It is not the intent of this volume to assert the universalized colonization of the human subject or the universalized colonization of “woman.” Rather the intent here is to offer explorations grounded in specific locations of colonialism and its legacies: for instance, colonial Kenya, India, Indochina/Vietnam. Our selection of essays takes as a guiding definition the one used by Chandra Talpade Mohanty when she argues that “however sophisticated or problematical its use as an explanatory construct, colonization almost invariably implies a relation of structural domination, and a suppression—often violent—of the heterogeneity of the subject(s) in question.”[9] And so, other essays open out the discussion of colonial practices and decolonizing strategies by looking at autobiographical subjects in such diverse contexts as post-reservation Native American culture, the Australian outback, pre- and postbellum American slavery, and compressed urban environments in Western countries.

The subject in question is called variously the colonial subject, the dominated object, and the marginalized subject. Acknowledging the significant distinctions among these phrases, we note here that, for the sake of brevity, we will use throughout our discussion the phrase the colonial subject. We note also that the writing/language that emanates from the position of the colonial subject is variously called the discourse of the margins, minority discourse, and postcolonial discourse. Whatever the lafbel, that subject and that writing emanate from what Abdul R. JanMohamed and David Lloyd call a position of damage, one in which “the cultural formations, languages, the diverse modes of identity of the ‘minoritized peoples’ are irreversibly affected, if not eradicated, by the effects of their material deracination from the historically developed social and economic structures in terms of which alone they ‘made sense.’”[10] And so, the essays in this collection, in their different ways, ask what autobiographical processes are set in motion when this subject struggles toward voice, history, and a future.

The Autobiographical Subject

The very notion of “autobiography” itself requires at least three perspectival adjustments. The first involves historicizing Western practices. Although the genres of life writing in the West emerge in Antiquity, the term autobiography is a post-Enlightenment coinage. Yet the word and the practice invoke a particular genealogy, resonant ideology, and discursive imperative. Powering and defining centers, margins, boundaries, and grounds of action in the West, traditional “autobiography” has been implicated in a specific notion of “selfhood.” This Enlightenment “self,” ontologically identical to other “I”s, sees its destiny in a teleological narrative enshrining the “individual” and “his” uniqueness.[11] Autobiography also entwines the definition of the human being in a web of privileged characteristics. Despite their myriad differences of place, time, histories, economies, and cultural identifications, all “I”s are rational, agentive, unitary. Thus the “I” becomes “Man,” putatively a marker of the universal human subject whose essence remains outside the vagaries of history, effectually what Spivak has termed the “straight white Christian man of property,”[12] whose identity is deeply embedded in a specific history of privilege.

Since Western autobiography rests upon the shared belief in a commonsense identification of one individual with another, all “I”s are potentially interesting autobiographers. And yet, not all are “I”s. Where Western eyes see Man as a unique individual rather than a member of a collectivity, of race or nation, of sex or sexual preference, Western eyes see the colonized as an amorphous, generalized collectivity. The colonized “other” disappears into an anonymous, opaque collectivity of undifferentiated bodies. In this way, argues Rey Chow, “Man (hence Europe) . . . hails the world into being . . . in such a way as to mark [the non-European world] off from European consciousness or universality.”[13] Moreover, heterogeneous “others” are collapsed and fashioned into an essentialized “other” whose “I” has no access to a privatized but privileged individuality.[14]

Thus the politics of this “I” have been the politics of centripetal consolidation and centrifugal domination. The cultural dominance of the West effectively enables this “Man” to “make a meaning stick,”[15] to make his meaning stick. The impact of this epistemological franchise on the matter of meaning has ramifications for the perpetuation of relations of dominance. As Deborah Cameron argues, “Meaning can be deployed to sustain domination” in that “it can reify domination by presenting as eternal and natural what is in fact historical and transitory.”[16] Erasing historical contingency in service to a universalized humanism, the Man without history contains and silences the heterogeneity of subject peoples.

Western autobiography colludes in this cultural mythmaking. One of the narratives that brings this Man into being, it functions as an exclusionary genre against which the utterances of other subjects are measured and misread. While inviting all subjects to participate in its practices, it provides the constraining template or the generic “law” against which those subjects and their diverse forms of self-narrative are judged and found wanting. In order to unstick both this Man and his meanings, we need to adjust, to reframe, our understanding of both traditional and counter-traditional autobiographical practices.

The second adjustment requires that we consider the flexibilities of generic boundaries. In fact, we need to consider, with Ralph Cohen, how “classifications,” including generic ones, “are empirical, not logical”; that is, how they are historical assumptions constructed by authors, audiences, and critics in order to serve communicative and aesthetic purposes.[17] And, we would add, political purposes. If that is so, autobiographical writing is at this historical moment a “genre of choice,” for authors, audiences, and critics. Autobiographical writing surrounds us, but the more it surrounds us, the more it defies generic stabilization, the more its laws are broken, the more it drifts toward other practices, the more formerly “out-law” practices drift into its domain.[18] While popular practitioners carry on the old autobiographical tradition, other practitioners play with forms that challenge us to recognize their experiments in subjectivity and account for their exclusion from “high” literature.

The third adjustment will require more time to accomplish. What has been designated as Western autobiography is only one form of “life writing.” There are other modes of life story-telling, both oral and written, to be recognized, other genealogies of life storytelling to be chronicled, other explorations of traditions, current and past, to be factored into the making and unmaking of autobiographical subjects in a global environment.[19]

Alternative and Diverse Autobiographical Practices

Decolonization is always a multidimensional process rather than a homogeneous achievement. And it involves the deformation/reformation of identity. That is why we have chosen to foreground the slash in the word de/colonization. The slash symbolizes the exchange between the processes of colonization and decolonization and the issues inherent in the process of neocolonization. Given the colonial, postcolonial, and neocolonial locales in which a writer produces an autobiographical text, what, then, does the speaker make of the autobiographical “I”? And what strategies drive, what meanings emerge from, what uses define her autobiographical project?

The autobiographical occasion (whether performance or text) becomes a site at which cultural ideologies intersect and dissect one another, in contradiction, consonance, and adjacency. Thus the site is rife with diverse potentials, some of which we would like to suggest here, some of which the essays that follow explore in more detail. Take the mimetic potential of autobiographical practice. On the one hand, the very taking-up of the autobiographical transports the colonial subject into the territory of the “universal” subject and thus promises a culturally empowered subjectivity. Participation in, through re/presentation of, privileged narratives can secure cultural recognition for the subject. On the other hand, entry into the territory of traditional autobiography implicates the speaker in a potentially recuperative performance, one that might reproduce and re/present the colonizer’s figure in negation.[20] For, to write “autobiography” is partially to enter into the contractual and discursive domain of universal “Man,” whom Rey Chow calls the “dominating subject.”[21] Entering the terrain of autobiography, the colonized subject can get stuck in “his meaning.” The processes of self-decolonization may get bogged down as the autobiographical subject reframes herself through neocolonizing metaphors.

Yet autobiographical practices can be productive in that process as the subject, articulating problems of identity and identification, struggles against coercive calls to a “universal humanity.”[22] For the marginalized woman, autobiographical language may serve as a coinage that purchases entry into the social and discursive economy.[23] To enter into language is to press back against total inscription in dominating structures, against the disarticulation of that spectral other that Chow calls the “dominated object.”[24] Precisely because she is subject to “incommensurable solicitations and heterogeneous social practices,”[25] the autobiographical speaker can resist the processes of negation. Deploying autobiographical practices that go against the grain, she may constitute an “I” that becomes a place of creative and, by implication, political intervention. “The colonized,” argue Chandra T. Mohanty and Satya P. Mohanty, “are not just the object of the colonizer’s discourses, but the agents of a conflicted history, inhabiting and transforming a complex social and cultural world.”[26] If, with Judith Butler, we think of agency as “located within the possibility of a variation on th[e] repetition” of certain “rule-bound discourse[s],”[27] and if we think of discourses of identity as heterogeneous even in their seeming hegemony, then we make a space in autobiographical practices for the agency of the autobiographical subject.

In this space, too, the autobiographical speaker may authorize an alternative way of knowing, filtered through what Barbara Harlow describes as specific “conditions of observation”[28] and others refer to as “experience.” Averring the integrity of her perspective on identity, experience, and politics, the autobiographical subject may offer up what Nancy Hartsock calls a “standpoint epistemology”: “an account of the world as seen from the margins, an account which can expose the falseness of the view from the top and can transform the margins as well as the center . . . an account of the world which treats our perspectives not as subjugated or disruptive knowledges, but as primary and constitutive of a different world.”[29] Thus both self-representation and self-presentation have the potential to intervene in the comfortable alignments of power relationships, relationships “controlled by conditioned ways of seeing.”[30] They also have the potential to celebrate through counter-valorization another way of seeing, one unsanctioned, even unsuspected, in the dominant cultural surround. And shifts in vision can herald social change, even the creation of new worlds, since, as Arif Dirlik argues, “culture is not only a way of seeing the world, but also a way of making and changing it.”[31]

Also in this alternative space, narrative itineraries may take different paths. For the colonial subject, the process of coming to writing is an articulation through interrogation, a charting of the conditions that have historically placed her identity under erasure. Consequently, her narratives do not necessarily fall into a privatized itinerary, the journey toward something, the personal struggle toward God, the entry into society of the Bildungsroman, the confessional mode, and the like. Such Western modes both define and collusively maintain the narrow range of narrative paradigms, holding the politicized dimension of identity and self, as of cultural consciousness, in abeyance. Such modes secure the “individual” rather than the collective character of self-representation. Yet even if the colonial subject does mime certain traditional patterns, she does so with a difference. She thus exposes their gaps and incongruities, wrenches their meanings, calls their authority into question,[32] for “illegitimate” speakers have a way of exposing the instability of forms.

As many of the essays acknowledge, the colonial subject inhabits a politicized rather than privatized space of narrative. Political realities cannot be evaded in the constitution of identity. In fact, attention to them can become a source of subversive power, as Harlow claims in her essay on women’s prison writings: “In the same way that institutions of power . . . are subverted by the demand on the part of dispossessed groups for an access to history, power, and resources, so too are the narrative paradigms and their textual authority being transformed by the historical and literary articulation of those demands.”[33] Attention to the politics of identity can also become a source of hybrid forms, what Kaplan calls “out-law” genres, and what others explore as counterhegemonic narratives: ideographic selfhood, ethnography, collective self-storytelling.

As a process and a product of decolonization, autobiographical writing has the potential to “transform spectators crushed with their inessentiality into privileged actors,” to foster “the veritable creation of new [wo]men,” to quote, with a shift in emphasis, the revolutionary Frantz Fanon.[34] Thus autobiographical performances, drawing upon exogenous and indigenous cultural practices, signal the heterogeneity of the subject and her narrative itinerary. In resistance to the panoptic figuration of an anonymous object unified as cultural representative, the autobiographical speaker may “dissolve,” as David Lloyd suggests, “the canonical form of Man back into the different bodies which it has sought to absorb.”[35] But the power of cultural forms to recolonize peoples cannot be underestimated. As all of this suggests, the relationship of the colonial subject to autobiographical inscription is indeed troubled.

The Essays

We offer here our contribution to the debates about autobiographical practices, politics, and gender in the global environment. We have tried to gather essays that range broadly around the world, from North to South, from the Americas to Africa to Australia. There are essays on women in historically colonial, transitional, and currently postcolonial environments; essays from various borders of marginality; essays on women writing from diverse class positions; essays exploring the authors’ positions in systems of oppression and their impact on the relationship between the author and the essay’s subject; essays exploring the complicities of authors in colonizing practices. From multiple perspectives we hope through this volume to investigate the heteronomous meanings of the “colonial subject” and to explore autobiography as a potential site of decolonization.

We do not claim to present here a representative sampling of women’s autobiographies of colonization and decolonization, nor do we claim to offer a “history” of such autobiographical practices. We believe that no definitive history could be collected and written at this time. Both the parameters of colonization and the texts of women’s coming to voice are in flux, with narratives still being “discovered” and produced, reprinted and translated, and otherwise brought into circulation. Nor can “academic” women necessarily measure the power of an autobiography to “speak” to readers either within a culture or transnationally. Our selections need to be understood as in every sense exemplary, and clustered in some areas at the expense of others.

For example, the Indian subcontinent, with its history of British colonization, is the only area of Asia explored in depth here. Yet the autobiographical practices discussed—of British women under the Raj, of Kamala Das, of Indira Gandhi as semiotic sign—offer illuminating instances of the numerous and complex ways that women’s self-representational practices both display and interrogate moments of this specific colonial heritage. British women in mid-nineteenth-century India, as Nancy Paxton shows, both participate in the Empire’s colonization of the bodies and subjectivity of the Indian populace and experience their own marginality within a gendered society that places them in proximity to, and sometimes in communication with, the silences of Indian women. By exploring the conjunction of technologies of gender and of imperialism in these texts, Paxton discovers points of exposure, those textual moments in which the constitution of the imperial ‘I’ confronts the destabilizing impacts of embodiedness. Shirley Geok-lin Lim discusses how Kamala Das explores the cultural imperatives that have defined her as a silent, dutiful postcolonial daughter. The insufficiency of available cultural discourses for Das to write her embodied sensuality leads her to unavoidably transgressive self-assertion. Lim explores how this negotiation of Indian female sexuality involves Das in an epistemological confrontation with patriarchal society. Gita Rajan discusses Indira Gandhi as a semiotic text of postliberation India to be deciphered against Western cultural modes of subjectivity. In Gandhi’s self-presentation, the subaltern is figured; but over successive historical moments, she both ensnares and undoes her subaltern status. Reading Gandhi, Rajan rereads both her own culture and the influential Indian critic, Gayatri Spivak, in order to rewrite the possibility of agency as/for Indian women. In this triangulated reflection on Indian de/colonization, Paxton, Lim, and Rajan are not primarily interested in defining colonizers and colonized, but in observing the operations that complicate distinctions between colonizer and colonized. In each case politics operates as a move from a private, unwritten history to an articulation that can become transformative and, in the rare case of Indira Gandhi, formative as collective political history.

The task of representing the range and specificity of women’s identities in the United States and North America has been daunting. We have made choices and left gaps for others to fill. The most notable gap is in Chicana autobiography, where both a first-person literature by such writers as Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Sandra Cisneros and critical work by such emerging literary critics as Ramón Saldívar and Sonia Saldívar thrives in book-length works that cannot be glossed briefly. But an exploration of how the appropriation of Chicano culture can be read through its cookbooks is mapped in Anne Goldman’s essay. Recipes for exoticization, hybridization, and normalization can be found in the remaking of Mexican food for mainstream American consumption, as can recipes for the distortion and erasure of indigenous cultures. As Goldman suggests, the Western reader has to begin by reading the effacement that the practices of the dominant culture have exercised upon ethnic identities in the name of authenticating them. But she also proposes, in her subsequent reading of the cookbook narratives of Cleofas Jaramillo and Fabiola Cabeza de Baca, how the colonized subject can resist cultural appropriation through her own authenticating of autobiographical recipes. Debra A. Castillo also explores how indigenous North American culture is literally colonized and its collective autobiographical inscription effaced. Tracing the migration of identity and the Western claim to ownership of the apparatuses of identity in Rosario Castellanos’s autobiographical writing, Castillo marks the disruption of language between a Mexican child of Spanish descent and her Indian nursemaid, who cannot lay claim to identity in verbal terms but is only the “ashes without a face” of centuries of colonization.

Other essays look to the problem of the subject in the African American community. In his essay on the narratives of ex-slaves, William L. Andrews focuses on the difference in discursive strategies employed by Harriet Jacobs, who, writing prior to the Civil War, invokes the moral discourse of true womanhood, and Elizabeth Keckley, who, writing just a few crucial years later, employs the discourse of economic materialism. This difference speaks not just of a historical shift in the formation of the African American woman’s cultural identity, but also of the variety and specificity of responses to oppression and of the bind of needing both to internalize and to resist/rewrite discursive strategies as the condition of writing the female subject into literary identity. Andrews points up the instability of borders separating colonization and decolonization, and refocuses our attention from a unitary agenda of liberation to the problematic of the subject speaking the master’s discourse if she is to speak at all.

In a similar vein, Claudine Raynaud considers Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road as a discursively manipulated text. Hurston’s autobiography was, if not colonized, censored by both her editor and herself as they struggled in the margins of the draft over the kind of subject that would be acceptable to her predominantly white audience. Working with previously unexamined manuscripts, Raynaud notes editorial excisions and interpolations in various hands and considers both their origins and the resulting differences in the voices of a text that has been read as Hurston’s “authoritative” autobiography. If Raynaud looks for the “noise” in the margins of the drafts of Hurston’s text, Françoise Lionnet theorizes the relationship between noise and the resistance of métissage. If autobiographical texts are reams of pages to be inscribed and excised, they are also voices—many voices in tension and in play. In examining the autobiographical writings of Jamaican-born American resident Michelle Cliff, Lionnet focuses on the patois of native dialect and the metaphors of mangoes and maroons in order to foreground Cliff’s strategies for writing the narrative of difference through the inimical discourses of standard English and First World autobiographical paradigms.

Native American ethnicities may also be read against the dominating culture’s penchant for stereotyping and classifying. The essays by Janice Gould and Greg Sarris are autobiographical essays about autobiography. Each writer insists on framing “autobiography” as a problematical model of storytelling that not only silences Native Americans but fails to account for differently told and differently heard stories. Gould explores the dilemma of being fixed through racist categorizations and the uncertainties of cultural identification she confronts as a Maidu mixed-blood. Yet, she identifies herself with a large and growing group of mixed-blood Native American writers who tell stories of difficult negotiations of cultural mixing, loss of homeland and tribal family, locations in urban landscapes where the particulars of difference are neither seen nor prized. Sarris’s autobiographical account of Mabel McKay’s appearance before a class of literature students at Stanford University is a double narrative of McKay’s unmaking of fictions of identity and her making, in a basket, of a figure of collective self-reference that is concretely located yet resistant to conventional Western modes of interpretation. Refusing to be contained in the lecture hall of the “mainline” institution, McKay unsettles her audience and challenges Sarris himself by telling stories that defy their understanding and classifying.

In another look at indigenous peoples, Kateryna Olijnyk Longley discusses the autobiographical narratives of aboriginal women in Australia whose identities are culturally under erasure and yet specifically oral, generational, and tribal. For Aborigines, as for many Native Americans, coming to writing and autobiographical inscription coincided with or resulted from oppression and genocidal acculturations. As Longley suggests, Aboriginal stories thus allude to an empowered past irretrievable outside collective narrative and a resulting sense of identity caught between flux and flight.

There is assuredly much in European autobiography to lure us: for instance, the engendering of the imperial subject in First World autobiography or the complexities of historical consciousness and the tensions of ethnicities and nationalisms in an increasingly “unified” Europe. We choose, however, to look at texts in which European women are placed in specific colonial locations. Marguerite Duras’s best-seller The Lover, as Suzanne Chester argues, positions the problems of de/colonization precisely at the slash. In this veiled autobiography personal history is written by and read through French colonial domination of Southeast Asia. The interplay of its subject’s complex positionings with respect to gender, class, and race creates a tension of discourses through which oppressor and oppressed constantly change places. For European women in colonial locations, identity becomes a nomadic fiction. In discussing the autobiographical narratives of Isak Dinesen and Beryl Markham, two white women writing of life in colonial Kenya, Sidonie Smith explores the relationship of gender to the narrative politics that emerge in a specific colonial environment. However divergent their narrative strategies, both Markham and Dinesen make and remake themselves as “African.” Between Africa as the maternal goddess in Dinesen’s nostalgic dream and Africa as the wild space of Markham’s masculinist adventuring, different metaphorical scenarios play out the complicities and resistances of “colonial” narrative practices.

The two essays on texts by Middle Eastern women explore the representation of childhood in part to foreground identity formation through practices of postcolonial education. Both discussions gesture toward the diversity of identity formations, ethnic heritages, and political configurations “orientalized” under the sign of the Middle East. In recovering the serialized autobiography of Egyptian feminist and educator Nabawiyya Musa from archives in Cairo, Margot Badran discovers a model of middle-class Egyptian “feminism” antinomial to the privileged and Europeanized feminism of Huda Sha’rawi, the only other pre-contemporary Egyptian woman autobiographer extensively discussed in the West to date. Badran reads a self-decolonizing strategy in Musa’s refusal of a model childhood, and her insistence on a childhood characterized by a series of rebellions that prepared her to oppose the Egyptian ideology of colonial womanhood in championing educational reforms. During a Palestinian winter, Janet Varner Gunn writes autobiographically of discovering her impatience with the imperialist presumption underlying Western idealization of the individual. In this setting she reads the reification of romantic individualism idealized in Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood against the unromantic realities of childhood and the “conscientization” of identity in the autobiography of Palestinian “terrorist” Leila Khaled. Gunn explores how Khaled’s education prepares her to question individualist values and to redefine identity as collective, history as mission, and education as practice. Reframing her own poetics of experience as a politics, Gunn asks if Western autobiographical writings, including her own, can avoid being acts of expropriation.

The essays by Lee Quinby, John Beverley, Caren Kaplan, and Carole Boyce Davies, in different ways, theorize the collection’s focus on women’s autobiography, inquiring into claims about subject formation that make such writing both persuasive and suspect. These mappings of the territorialization and transgression of autobiographical theory offer a mirror for reading these essays against First World accounts of autobiography and its canon. Quinby uses The Woman Warrior to develop a Foucauldian analysis of how the female subject of autobiography is formed at the intersection of two discourses of power, the systems of alliance and sexuality, that are deployed to maintain the daughter’s silence and marginalization. Quinby argues for reading Hong Kingston’s narrative as “memoirs,” promoting the new subjectivity of ideographic selfhood, rather than as autobiography, because she considers autobiography’s totalizing and normalizing of the subject to be implicated in modern power structures. In an influential essay published three years ago and reprinted here with a new postscript, John Beverley discusses testimonio as an embryonic form of collective autobiographical witnessing that gives voice to the struggles of oppressed peoples against neo- and postcolonial exploitation. Testimonio has to be seen, Beverley argues, as an alternative to autobiography, an essentially conservative humanistic mode. A narrative urge to communicate the personal as political becomes, in testimonio, an affirmation of the marginalized speaking subject and her experience of the real. In I, Rigoberta Menchú Beverley finds conscious resistance to “a humanist ideology of the literary.” The subject of testimonio narrates more than she authors, in the Western sense, her subalternity, and thus destabilizes the reader’s world.

Caren Kaplan both builds on and resituates Beverley’s analysis of testimonio as a form of anti-humanistic, collective witnessing in her notion of out-law genres of autobiography. She sees as problematic autobiography’s fixation on stable—read nationally identified—subjects at a time when identities are nomadic, national borders are being redefined, and the parameters invoked in naming women’s differences are shown to be part of the instrumentality for maintaining those differences. Kaplan proposes, in this transitional surround, reframing autobiographical practice through “out-law” genres. Refusing to contain collaborative life stories in traditional autobiographical frameworks, Carole Boyce Davies discusses the ways in which this “crossover genre” becomes a form for the empowerment of women formerly silenced. Elaborating the degree and the form of editorial intervention in three forms of collaborative life storytelling, she considers the complex dynamic between the speaking subject and the “interpreter” in projects that transform oral histories into written texts.

Finally, Julia Watson considers “sexual decolonization” as a notion within Western feminism that appears problematic when read in the context of neocolonial and postcolonial women’s writing. Generally invoked in critiques of a universalized patriarchy, sexual decolonization requires an oppositional framework that reifies sexual difference. But autobiographies both lesbian and feminist have now begun to critique oppositional notions of gender for their complicity in maintaining heterosexist hegemony. In Audre Lorde’s “biomythography,” Adrienne Rich’s irreducibly split self-representation, and Jo Spence’s phototherapy, Watson finds autobiographical practices that deconstruct hierarchical sexual difference while contesting sexual identity as a sufficient index of colonized status.

These introductory remarks suggest possible ways to stimulate debate around the key concepts we have been addressing: colonization, decolonization, authorship, authenticity, agency, subjectivity, individuality, location, resistance, collusion. But our intent is less to fix the relationships than to provoke connections. Individual readers will make and remake this dialogue to fit their different interests.

We do want, however, to call into question Western literary practices and theorizing. It does us no good, it does literary practice no good, to take up critical definitions, typologies, reading practices, and thematics forged in the west through the engagement with canonical Western texts and to read texts from various global locations through those lenses. Different texts from different locales require us to develop different theories and practices of reading, what we might call “standpoint” reading practices. Such practices call all of us, positioned specifically in our own locales, both to engage the autobiographical practices of colonial subjects and to critique our own points of observation.[36]

Finally, despite the location of production, we hope that our collection signifies a collectivity of people working in a global environment, positioned in different personal and theoretical locations. We hope, then, that we gesture toward what Kaplan calls “transnational” perspectives rather than enshrining neo-imperialist scriptures on the politics of autobiographical practices. We have worked to resist an easy and imperialist universalization of experience in order to recognize, salute, and give validity to positions of difference and to affinities rather than prescriptive identifications. We do not want to appropriate in a too-easy gesture of imperial identification, or to romanticize in a fantasy of feminist homogeneity, or to silence by a telescoping act of interpretation the multiple and specific voices of the postcolonial autobiographical texts here invoked.

Notes

1. Doris Sommer, ‘“Not just a Personal Story’: Women’s Testimonios and the Plural Self’” in Life/Lines: Theorizing Women’s Autobiography, ed. Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenck (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988), 111.

2. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak? Speculations on Widow Sacrifice,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313. This provocative essay has generated various contestatory theoretical stances on the “voice” of the subaltern.

3. Elizabeth V. Spelman, Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (Boston: Beacon, 1988); see especially chapter 5.

4. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The Political Economy of Women as Seen by a Literary Critic,” in Coming to Terms: Feminism, Theory, Politics, ed. Elizabeth Weed (New York: Routledge, 1989), 226.

5. Carolyn Kay Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 65–82.

6. For a provocative analysis of the struggle of “the universal human subject” with all the “colorful” around it, see Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986), 199.

7. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 13.

8. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” Boundary 2, 12 (1984): 336. See also Ketu H. Katrak, “Decolonizing Culture: Toward a Theory for Postcolonial Women’s Texts,” Modern Fiction Studies 35 (Spring 1989): 158–60.

9. Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes,” 336.

10. Abdul R. JanMohamed and David Lloyd, “Introduction,” Cultural Critique 6 (Spring 1987): 8–9.

11. David Lloyd argues that the concept of a universal human subject soliciting common identification “inaugurates a universal history of development which always contains the realization of individual autonomy within a narrative so exclusive that it becomes the legitimation of an irreducible heteronomy,” with the result that “the path by which social identity is formed is the one which leads back from differentiation to identification with an imperial Man whose destiny is always the same.” “Genet’s Genealogy: European Minorities and the Ends of the Canon,” Cultural Critique 6 (Spring 1987): 85.

12. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Harper’s Magazine (September 1989), 52.

13. Rey Chow, ‘“It’s you and not me’: Domination and ‘Othering’ in Theorizing the ‘Third World,”’ in Coming to Terms: Feminism, Theory, Politics, ed. Elizabeth Weed (New York: Routledge, 1989), 158.

14. As JanMohamed and Lloyd argue, “Minority individuals are always treated and forced to experience themselves generically.” “Introduction,” 10.

15. John B. Thompson, Studies in the Theory of Ideology (Cambridge: Polity, 1984), 132. Deborah Cameron quotes this passage in her comparative analysis of various feminist language theories, “What Is the Nature of Women’s Oppression in Language?” Oxford Literary Review 8 (1986): 84.

16. Cameron, “What Is the Nature,” 83.

17. Ralph Cohen, “History and Genre,” New Literary History 17 (Winter 1986): 210.

18. See Marjorie Perloff, “Introduction,” in Postmodern Genres, ed. Marjorie Perloff (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988), 7.

19. On Arabic autobiographical traditions see, for instance, Leila Ahmed, “Between Two Worlds: The Formation of a Turn-of-the-Century Egyptian Feminist,” in Life/Lines: Theorizing Women’s Autobiography, ed. Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenck (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988), 154–74. On traditions of life writing in Japan, see Chizuko Yonamine, ‘“Self in a Tenth-Century Japanese Autobiography” (paper presented at the conference “New Approaches to Biography: Challenges from Critical Theory,” University of Southern California, 19–21 October 1990).

20. See Abdul R. JanMohamed, “Negating the Negation as a Form of Affirmation in Minority Discourse: The Construction of Richard Wright as Subject,” Cultural Critique 7 (Fall 1987): 246–47.

21. Chow, “It’s you,” 157.

22. “The most crucial aspect of resisting the hegemony,” suggests JanMohamed, “consists in struggling against its attempt to form one’s subjectivity, for it is through the construction of the minority subject that the dominant culture can elicit the individual’s own help in his/her oppression.” JanMohamed, 246–47.

23. For a discussion of the relation between hegemonic domination and human agency, see Benita Parry, “Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse,” Oxford Literary Review 9 (1987): 27–58. Parry suggests that certain strands of deconstructive practice that take their cue from Derridean deconstruction produce “a theory assigning an absolute power to the hegemonic discourse in constituting and disarticulating the native.” Thus from one point of view, the subaltern does not, cannot, “talk back” to the “metropolis.” Critiquing Spivak’s theory, Parry suggests that “the story of colonialism which she reconstructs is of an interactive process where the European agent in consolidating the imperialist Sovereign Self, induces the native to collude in its own subject(ed) formation as other and voiceless. Thus while protesting at the obliteration of the native’s subject position in the text of imperialism, Spivak in her project gives no speaking part to the colonized” (p. 35).

24. Chow, “It’s you,” 157.

25. Parry, “Problems in Current Theories,” 43–44.

26. Chandra T. Mohanty and Satya P. Mohanty, “Contradictions of Colonialism,” Women’s Review of Books 7 (March 1990), 19.

27. “To understand identity as a practice, and as a signifying practice,” suggests Butler, “is to understand culturally intelligible subjects as the resulting effect of a rule-bound discourse that inserts itself in the pervasive and mundane signifying acts of linguistic life.” Gender Trouble, 145. See also Paul Smith, who argues that “a person is not simply an actor who follows ideological scripts, but is also an agent who reads them in order to insert him/herself into them or not.” Discerning the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), xxxiv-xxxv.

28. Barbara Harlow, “Introduction,” in The Colonial Harem, Malek Alloula (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), xxii.

29. Nancy Hartsock, “Foucault on Power: A Theory for Women?” in Feminism! Postmodernism, ed. Linda J. Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1990), 171.

30. Arif Dirlik. “Culturalism as Hegemonic Ideology and Liberating Practice,” Cultural Critique 6 (Spring 1987): 14.

31. Dirlik, “Culturalism as Hegemonic Ideology,” 14. “Recalling culture in its double meaning,” suggests Dirlik, “both as a ‘way of seeing’ and as a way of making the world, remains the historical subject (or agent) to his dialectical temporality which, Jameson has suggested, decenters him from his privileged position in history . . . in other words, there is the possibility of a truly liberating practice which can exist only as a possibility and which must take as its premise the denial of a center to the social process and of a predestined direction to history” (49).

32. Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” October 28 (1984): 125–33. See also Parry’s critique of Bhabha’s concept of mimicry/hybridity. She argues that, unlike Spivak, Bhabha makes a space for the articulation of the subaltern or minoritized speaker: “A narrative which delivers the colonized from its discursive status as the illegitimate and refractory foil of Europe, into a position of ‘hybridity’ from which it is able to circumvent, challenge and refuse colonial authority, has no place for a totalizing notion of epistemic violence. Nor does the conflictual economy of the colonialist text allow for the unimpeded operation of discursive aggression.” “Problems in Current Theories,” 42.

33. Barbara Harlow, “From the Women’s Prison: Third World Women’s Narratives of Prison,” Feminist Studies 12 (Fall 1986): 502—3.

34. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961), trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 36.

35. Lloyd, “Genet’s Genealogy,” 185.

36. Spivak warns that academic scholars must engage the texts of the other through knowledge of the language of the other. “Political Economy,” 228.