Autobiography: Between Colonialism and Postcolonialism

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My research investigates the ways in which autobiography and kindred genres are inflected by issues of colonialism and postcolonialism. The first part of the text considers how some of the canonical figures of western autobiography - Augustine, Montaigne, Rousseau and Roland Barthes - each use the non-western Self as a means to constitute themselves as both individual autobiographical subjects and representatives of their cultures. I will demonstrate that although western ways of understanding the Self - and modes of writing it -change radically between classical, Early Modern, Enlightenment and Postmodern times, an engagement with the non-western Self remains a constant in the historical evolution of the genre. No-one has yet noticed or investigated this striking fact, which offers me the opportunity to rethink autobiography in potentially radical ways.The second part of the text focusses on colonial autobiography, using the example of South Africa. Here the emphasis will be on the ways in which colonial conceptions of Self are in part constructed out of a differential engagement with (ideas of) the non-Western Self, which ranges from outright disavowal to a tentative recognition of commonalities with colonised Subjects. As empire comes to an end, I will demonstrate, so the boundaries between the colonial Self and its colonised Others are progressively eroded.In the third and longest part of the text, I will attempt to define what is specific to postcolonial life-writing and what distinguishes it from both metropolitan and colonial autobiography. After defining in detail what I mean by both 'postcolonial' and 'life-writing' (and why I prefer the latter term to 'autobiography' in this context), I will explore five key areas of investigation. 1. how conceptions of what Smith and Watson call the 'ideological I' vary within postcolonial life-writing and how they at times distinguish it from its western equivalents. I will argue that where postcolonial life-writing does seek to constitute the kind of 'sovereign self' so often celebrated in western autobiography, this often has a political aim, rather than liberal-individualist, agenda. The 'unified self' is thus part of the reclamation of a humanity denied to colonised subjects under colonialism.2. the ways in which postcolonial life-writing uses local or non-western narrative forms as a means of Self-expression. Thus one might consider the way that Indian writers draw on traditional texts like the 'Gitas' to structure their life-writings, or the way that Isabel Allende draws on the central American tradition of muralism to construct a narrative which is more organised round spatial principles than the temporal linearity favoured in western autobiography.3. the attempt in postcolonial life-writing to make the 'autobiographical' text representative not just of individual Selves, but of whole communities, even nations. Thus in (proto)nationalist examples of life-writing, the emergence of the individual Self often functions as an allegory of the emergence of the nation-to-be to which the writer putatively belongs. Moreover, the sub-genre often seeks to stress the collective nature of its production.4. the ways in which postcolonial life-writing functions counter-discursively by its widespread engagement with a number of genres which are traditionally seen as distinct from autobiography in the West. In particular, I will explore the role of historiography 'from below', 'counter-ethnography' and travel-writing as constituent parts of the genre. I will also explore the roles of fiction within the genre.5. in canonical western autobiography, the body is often approached in a dehistoricised way, paying no attention to ethnicity as an embodied fact of identity. By contrast, the 'raced' body is a central subject of postcolonial life-writing by virtue of the facts of colonial history, which made the body (and bodily) labour of the colonised a prime concern.