Autobiography: Between Colonialism and Postcolonialism

我的研究调查了自传和同类体裁受到殖民主义和后殖民主义问题影响的方式。本文的第一部分考察了一些西方自传的权威人物——奥古斯丁、蒙田、卢梭和罗兰·巴特——是如何将非西方的自我作为一种手段，使自己既成为个人自传的主体，又成为各自文化的代表。我将证明，尽管西方理解自我的方式和写作方式在古典、早期现代、启蒙运动和后现代时期发生了根本性的变化，但与非西方自我的接触在这一类型的历史演变中仍然是不变的。还没有人注意到或调查过这个惊人的事实，这给了我一个机会，以可能激进的方式重新思考自传。文章的第二部分着重于殖民自传，以南非为例。在这里，重点将放在殖民主义的自我概念是如何在一定程度上建立在与非西方自我（观念）的不同接触之上的，其范围从彻底的否认到对与被殖民主体的共性的尝试性承认。随着帝国走向终结，我将证明，殖民自我和被殖民他者之间的界限正在逐渐被侵蚀。在本文的第三部分，也是最长的部分，我将尝试定义什么是后殖民生活写作的特殊性，以及它与都市和殖民自传的区别。在详细定义了我所说的“后殖民”和“生活写作”（以及为什么在这种情况下我更喜欢后者而不是“自传”）之后，我将探索五个关键的调查领域。1. 在后殖民时期的生活写作中，史密斯和沃森所称的“意识形态的我”的概念是如何变化的，以及他们如何将其与西方的等价物区分开来。我认为，当后殖民生活写作确实试图构成西方自传中经常颂扬的那种“主权自我”时，这往往有一个政治目标，而不是自由个人主义的议程。因此，“统一的自我”是殖民主义剥夺了被殖民主体的人性的一部分。后殖民生活写作使用当地或非西方叙事形式作为自我表达手段的方式。因此，人们可能会考虑印度作家利用传统文本，如“gita”来构建他们的生活写作的方式，或者伊莎贝尔·阿连德利用中美洲的壁画传统来构建一种叙事方式，这种叙事方式更有组织地围绕空间原则，而不是西方自传中青睐的时间线性。在后殖民生活写作中，试图使“自传体”文本不仅代表个人自我，而且代表整个社区，甚至国家。因此，在（原始的）民族主义的生活写作范例中，个体自我的出现往往是对作者被假定属于的未来国家出现的寓言。此外，子类型往往试图强调其生产的集体性质。后殖民生活写作的反话语功能，通过广泛参与一些传统上被视为不同于西方自传的体裁。特别是，我将探索“自下而上”的史学，“反民族志”和旅行写作作为该类型的组成部分的作用。我还将探讨小说在这一流派中的角色。在经典的西方自传中，身体通常以一种去历史化的方式被处理，不关注种族作为身份的具体事实。相比之下，由于殖民历史的事实，“种族”的身体是后殖民生活写作的中心主题，这使得被殖民者的身体（和身体）劳动成为主要关注的问题。

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.