Politique de l'autobiographie: engagements et subjectivités éd. by Jean-François Hamel, Barbara Havercroft, et Julien Lefort-Favreau (review)

This collection of twenty essays represents the proceedings from a 2015 colloquium at University of Toronto, the contents of which cover an astonishing array of modern and contemporary French autobiography loosely understood (autobiographie, mémoire, récit de vie, témoignage, autofiction, autocritique, etc.). Organized thematically and roughly chronologically, the section titled "Un genre à l'épreuve du siècle: le sujet en révolutions" is devoted to critical and theoretical essays on autobiography and the political (Sartre, Leiris, Emmanuèle de Lesseps/Durand, Xavière Gauthier, Marguerite Duras, Anne Zelensky/Tristan, Leslie Kaplan, Blanchot, Régis Debray). The part on "Contemporanéités: héritages critiques et réinventions littéraires" explores the rich variety in form and function of more contemporary autobiographical works (Patrick Deville, Antoine Volodine, Jean-Marie Gleize, Pierre Bergounioux, Liliane Giraudon, Claude Arnaud, Virginie Linhart), and the last part,"D'un genre à l'autre: l'écriture de soi et les rapports de sexe,"looks at sexual identity and autobiography as political force (Annie Ernaux, Camille Laurens, Chloé Delaume, Pierre Seel, Virginie Despentes, Beatriz/Paul Preciado, Jean Genêt, Édouard Louis). The autobiographical works of well-known authors and the not-so-well-known (May 68 and MLF activists, the LGBQT community, writers Leslie Kaplan and Nicole Caligaris, journalist Jean Hatzfeld) are inscribed within a political "practice" that problematizes the autobiographical subject as such. History leaving an indelible mark upon the writing of self, the autobiographer's relationship to the events of World War II, wars of liberation, the Cold War, May 68 and beyond, changes the very practice of autobiography whereby self-understanding seems of necessity a writing of self as witness, activist and/or victim of history. The impact of Marxist politics is massive (both Stalinist and Maoist strands, embraced and/or abandoned depending on the author: Sartre, Leiris, Leslie Kaplan, Debray), autobiography rendered the"double articulation du soi et de l'identité collective" whereby the disintegration or "désindividualisation de soi" (11) becomes central to the narrative, and the text itself, a tool for political or social activism. (See J.-F. Hamel's essay,"Le communisme des autres: amitié et politique dans le cycle autobiographique de Jean-Paul Sartre [1960–1964]" for a highly original analysis of the impact of the author's late rupture with the PCF upon his autobiography practice). After May 68, the women's movement, critics Foucault or Judith Butler, and the advent of minority rights, questions concerning not only what constitutes the subject but how to articulate it mark another shift in autobiography toward a politics of identity, explored in a variety of forms and voices emanating from specific minority groups in opposition to collective identity. The extraordinarily high level of scholarship reflected in this collection is evidence of an original and formative contribution to autobiographical studies, and those working in the areas of twentieth-century French politics and literature, theory of autobiography or contemporary French literature would do well to add this work to their library.