Autobiographical Voices

Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture

Bibliographic Data

ID5769231
AuthorsFrançoise Lionnet (0000-0002-7300-6775, corresponding author), Adele King
Year2018
Publication date2018-05-26
Open AccessYes
TypeBOOK
Reviewed byAutobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture, Melanie Hawthorne, 1991
Reviewed byAutobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture, Françoise Lionnet, 1990
VenueAutobiographical Voices (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherCornell University Press (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.7591/9781501723100
OpenAlexW4243388274
Open LibraryOL51034321M
ISBN9781501723100
LanguageEN
Citations received62
References cited7

As the editors of Reading Women Writing, we are committed to furthering international feminist debate.To that end, we seek books that rigorously explore how differences of class, race, ethnic back ground, nationality, religious preference, and sexual choice inform women's writing.Books sensitive to the ways women's writings are classified, evaluated, read, and taught are central to the series.Dedi cated primarily although not exclusively to the examination of litera ture written by women, Reading Women Writing highlights differing, even contradictory, theoretical positions on texts read in cultural context.Of particular interest to us are feminist criticism of non canonical texts (including film, popular culture, and new and as yet unnamed genres); confrontations of first-world theory with beyond the-first-world texts; and books on colonial and postcolonial writing that generate their own theoretical positions.Among volumes in prospect for the series are a book on women's prison narratives in international context, a study of incest and the writing daughter in Jean Rhys and H.D., and a reading of popular film, sexual differ ence, and spectatorship in an emphatically social context.Fran<;oise Lionnet's Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Por traiture, the inaugural volume of Reading Women Writing, is compara tive, theoretical, and political; it is also formally innovative.Lionnet groups Afro-American, Caribbean, and Indian Ocean texts without effacing their differences; by means of comparative analysis, she expands the theoretical boundaries of women's autobiography.In her nonlinear, inter-referential readings of these texts, she avoids viil Fore ord hypostasizing either "black omen' s autobiography" or "Indian Ocean omen's autobiography."Then, too, by invoking Augustine and Nietzsche, not as models of masculine autobiography to hich she l set contrasting female examples, but for the feminine in them, she reads through and against these male texts: both to sho omen riters' indebtedness to an autobiographical tradition and to imagine that tradition retroactively in the light of omen's texts.The concept of metissage, exuberantly elaborated in Lionnet's text, propels Autobiographical Voices at every level.The inseparable aes thetic and political functions of metissage link the five omen au thors discussed-Hurston, Angelou, Cardinal, Conde, Humbert and join the hole comparative reading to the political stance Lion net takes, appropriating the Da inian notion of strength in diver sity.Metissage is also the basis for Lionnet's positioning of herself as a reader/subject; she is herself a metisse, born in Mauritius, educated in France, no living and teaching in America.Finally, metissage functions as a strategy for approaching her book: a reader may pur sue any number of paths through the text, considering out of se quence, for example, the chapters on Augustine, Angelou and Humbert.The reader thereby participates in the book's production by making a commitment-political, as Lionnet ould have it-to bricolage, reading, as it ere, as a metisseuse.The very form of Autobiographical Voices is necessarily hybrid.It dares scholarly con vention to be adequate to its diversity of critical moves

Art · Colonialism · Immigration · Linguistics · Literature · Narrative · Nationality · Race (biology) · Sociology · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Gender Studies · History · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Psychology · Race, History, and American Society · Autobiography, women authors · biography · History and criticism · Literature, Modern · Literature, modern, history and criticism · Women

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