De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women's Autobiography (review)

72 biography Vol. 18, No. 1 Gunnars, Buss suggests, "may feel it necessary to name her personal memoir of a twentieth-century citizen's life a 'novel,' to protect it and herself from all the baggage the word 'autobiography' carries in traditional definitions." As Buss asserts elsewhere on the same page, "one of the reasons given in the past for women's exclusion from mainstream generic contracts has been that they write too autobiographically" (197). The point, I think, is found in a question Buss asks when she introduces her third part—"Finding a Counter-Discourse"—"How does a writer tell the whole truth?" (183); then, by way of autobiographical illustration, she goes on to focus on a point of "disremembering"—that is, attributing a memory mentioned earlier to her mother, not her grandmother, as she had said before. Indeed. The absence of generic definition in Mapping Our Selves is troubling— however preferable openness may be—exactly because it is impossible for any writer to "tell the whole truth." And the putative dividing lines between autobiography, fiction, and biography—lurking throughout Buss's analysis—need to be dealt with. In contrast, and as I have argued elsewhere, some of Alice Munro's fictions are as autobiographical as autobiographies—including those examined here—are fictional . Timothy Dow Adams speaks of "telling lies" in autobiography (Buss 20); Munro once proposed True Lies as a title for a work of "fiction." Genre matters, however difficult its distinctions, and it deserves more attention here than it gets. What I hope these last few paragraphs suggest about Mapping Our Selves is that it both excites in its wide-ranging and precisely thoughtful analysis and, probably far more importantly, it demands both response and debate. What Buss has to say about autobiography, autobiographical texts by women, theoretical contexts, individual cruxes, and just the ways women's writing works is both demanding and compelling. This is a book which should be read by anyone interested in autobiography and, despite its gaps, the autobiographical in fiction. By mapping the self— and mapping herself—Helen M. Buss makes an important contribution to the analysis of autobiography and to Canadian literary studies. Robert Thacker St. Lawrence University SlDONIE SMITH and Julia Watson, editors, DelColonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women's Autobiography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. xxxi + 484 pp. 819.95. This collection of twenty essays takes as its focal point issues of subjectivity and othering in women's autobiographies that have emerged within the framework of colonialism and die process of decolonization. While the contributors acknowledge the material repercussions of anti-imperialist movements throughout the globe that have undone centuries-old schemes of economic and cultural domination , they concentrate specifically on offering a critical assessment of representational strategies that have emerged in this period to challenge the established hegemony of colonial discursive practices in prescribing subjective agency. It is unanimously agreed by the essayists that traditional autobiography, as a tool for self representation within the postcolonial and postmodern world, is problematic and lacking in its ability to serve the discursive needs of new subjec- REVIEWS 73 tivities. Gender, class, racial and edinic identifying features of alterity, that heretofore have prevented the subaltern from engaging completely in the postEnlightenment autobiographical contract, are now posited within the collection as indispensable considerations for postcolonial self-invention, and, as such, form the groundstone for the theoretical discussions of these essays. Indeed, the subtitle of the collection, The Politics of Gender in Women's Autobiography, is perhaps a misnomer in that gender is highlighted only as distinguishing this collection 's focus on women's self writing as opposed to men's, but gender by no means is the privileged characteristic of critical analysis. Instead the collection, as a whole, offers multiple perspectives on the intersection and relationship of gender, class, race, ethnicity, and sexuality, and the manner in which the confluence of these factors condition women's autobiographical practices. The essays included here are posited within a global context that reaches "from North to SoutÃ-i, from America to Africa to Australia" (xxi). Although the topics are diverse, ranging from a catalog of Australian Aboriginal women's lifestory productions to...