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

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