Acts of Narrative Resistance: Women's Autobiographical Writings in the Americas

Introduction

Introduction For many women, access to autobiography means access to the identity it constructs. Therefore, the distinction between self-representation as a political discourse and self-representation as an artistic practice is less important than their simultaneity of function in a particular culture and for specific audiences. —leigh gilmore, autobiographics Theorists of autobiography have struggled for decades to define what autobiography is and what it is not, to mark out the distinctions between autobiography and fiction, and to decide to what extent we can commit to the referentiality of an autobiographical text or to what extent every autobiographical subject is a fictive subject, just a pleasing illusion. Regardless of all the discussion and theoretical debate, autobiographical texts remain popular with readers, with presses, with critics, with moviegoers, with all sorts of audiences and publics. Turning lives into stories seems irresistible. We turn to life narratives in part to see what they might teach us about how individuals in different cultures experience their sense of being an “I” (Eakin, How 4). The autobiographical texts chosen for this study are written by and about individuals whose experiences of being an “I” have not always been valued either in the dominant cultures of their nations or in the dominant literary cultures of autobiographical studies. These writers have chosen autobiographical genres in order to claim spaces in which they might write an “I,” or sometimes a “we,” that can work to uncover mechanisms of oppression and lay out paths toward political and social change. I examine autobiographical genres created at the nexus of political discourse and artistic practice, taking as my examples texts written out of diverse but particular cultures of the Americas. I discuss three specific autobiographical practices of contemporary women of the Americas, practices that can be read as forms of narrative resistance. In naming 2 / acts of narrative resistance their own identities as part of their struggles to challenge domination, the women employing these genres create autobiographical acts of political and narrative resistance. Their texts resist easy classification into traditional generic categories; many of them demonstrate narrative resistance in their form of construction as those who tell their life stories resist the conventions and language of the traditional, male-authored, Euro-American autobiography. I focus on these works as acts of narrative resistance. Barbara Harlow asserts that the term “resistance” was first used in a 1966 study that makes an important distinction between literature written under occupation and that written in exile, noting: [S]uch a distinction presupposes a people’s collective relationship to a common land, a common identity, or a common cause on the basis of which it becomes possible to articulate the difference between the two modes of historical and political existence, between, that is, “occupation” and “exile.” The distinction presupposes furthermore an “occupying power” which has either exiled or subjugated, in this case both exiled and subjugated, a given population and has in addition significantly intervened in the literary and cultural development of the people it has dispossessed and whose land it has occupied. Literature, in other words, is presented by the critic as an arena of struggle. (2) Harlow’s discussion of the term “resistance” resonates with literature produced by Indigenous peoples and with testimonial literature in Latin America—a literature frequently identified with resistance movements in Latin American countries as the witnesses who are moved to narrate are often involved in proposing revolutionary solutions for the problems in their nations. Narrative works of resistance literature directly confront both the critic and the artist with the responsibilities of involvement in the political context in which the works are constructed (Harlow 78). The autobiographical genres and works by women writers of the Americas I explore here can be read as resistance literature. While the related pedagogical arguments lie beyond the scope of this book, I would also, in a broader context, argue for teaching many of these autobiographical works as acts of narrative resistance in order to confront scholars and students with the responsibilities of involvement in the political contexts in which these texts are constructed.1 In an effort to generate new readings with this book, I pair works by women writers from different nations, in most cases writing in different introduction / 3 languages. Each pair is chosen for its exemplification of a particular genre or tradition in women’s autobiographical writings in the Americas. In offering this series of contextualized paired readings of...