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Article Excerpt
The title of this essay is deliberately ambiguous. "Autobiographical criticism" suggests both criticism about autobiography and criticism as a form of self-writing, concepts that are neither mutually exclusive nor, necessarily, mutually constituting. By looking at two texts of autobiographical criticism, Francoise Lionnet's Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture and Sylvia Molloy's At Face Value: Autobiographical Writing in Spanish America, I want to explore how and where these two distinct phenomena merge, overlap, and separate, with reference to feminist critical practice.
Contemporary feminist criticism in the United States began with second wave feminism, when the theoretical work of the women's movement had to do primarily with women trying to explain the relationship between our own lives and the structures of patriarchy. Autobiography in particular was attractive to feminist writers and readers as an apparently direct way to get to how women lived and how they experienced their reality. It was an instrument for recovering our lost history. For us as students, to write within the University about women writers was a means of transforming the institution to make it relevant to our own lives and needs. (1) As young faculty members (many of us part-time and temporary) it was a way to bring together our professional lives with our personal lives and with our political work in the feminist movement. To that extent, feminist criticism began as an autobiographical gesture; not just because in it we were finding and writing our own lives in the texts we were reading and writing about, but because through the practice of feminist criticism we were producing our personal, political, and certainly our professional lives. (2)
An early demand of feminist scholarship was that the critic eschew the scholarly "we," spoken as from on high, an authoritative stance that was thought not to be sisterly. Also banished (or at least interrogated) was the passive voice, unmasked as a patriarchal strategy for making truth claims and shirking responsibility for them, as in, "It has been shown that excessive reading in women leads to the withering of the ovaries." We insisted on using the very personal critical "I"; and "we," as I use it here, was in that utopian moment the collective voice, sometimes of feminist thinkers and sometimes, even, of "women." The early auto(bio)graphical I of feminist criticism assumed a stable, pretty much unitary, woman-self that belonged, for the most part, to middle-class white women whose "otherness," as far as they/we knew, resided only in our gender. It was an I less concerned with writing the personal self than it was in establishing itself as the bearer of a collective political/critical reality. It was about its own universality, within the newly disclosed universe of women. (3)
However tenuous it was within the belly of the patriarchal beast, this was the hegemonic academic feminism of the late 1960s and early 1970s: white, middle class, heterosexual, and written in English, mostly about English language texts. Yet even in its early stages, at the margin of this already marginalized discourse, this universalizing feminist scholarship was challenged by other voices, particularly those of African American women, Latinas, and lesbians (not, obviously, mutually exclusive categories). (4) Since feminist scholars with only our gender to hinder us were the fastest to achieve legitimacy, those voices have too often been forgotten; but they were there, refuting the radical sameness of all women and pointing to multiple oppression, multiple political allegiances, and the complexity of identity.
It is not too much to say that by now this counterhegemonic feminism has transformed feminist theory, scholarship, and criticism in the United States. (5) The unproblematic, unmodified feminist I is deposed. No politically or theoretically responsible feminist scholarship any more supposes the universality or indivisibility of "woman." The speaking I has been reconstituted as unstable and particular, in need of explanation and location, deessentialized and historicized.
The autobiographical gesture of today's feminist critics, therefore, eschews the claims to universal representativity of a few years back. Instead, it signals the particular. Feminist criticism now virtually requires the critic to take account of her own history and geography and, crucially, where she stands in a certain relation to her subject matter, a relation that she does not share with all other women. Paradoxically, this has resulted in a new representativity, not of all women, but of an increasing number of subsets. The last fifteen or twenty years have seen the ascendancy of a locational feminism, with its elaboration of an ever more refined political and epistemic grid of (among other locators) race, gender, and class, on which the scholar is to place herself. Figuring out how to speak from this space, and whether it is restrictive, or liberating, or necessary, has been one of feminist criticism's major tasks. Mae Henderson, to take one example, locates both herself and her subject matter at the crossroads of race and gender. Henderson sees this as a fruitful location where language is enriched, both for the African American woman writer, who can speak to multiple audiences and for the critic who can "[examine] the ways in which the perspective of race and gender, and their interrelationships, structure the discourse of black women writers" (17). Uma Narayan, however, is less sanguine about the benefits of occupying multiple sites on the epistemic grid. For her, the crisscrossing lines can too easily become restrictive boundary markers.
The locational grid is not, however, just a feminist device. It has been invoked by critics of minority literatures (by which I mean those set apart within the North American university--Asian as well as Asian American, Latin American as well as U.S. Latino, etc.), and it often imposes a new, unwanted representativity. Rey Chow struggles against the demands of Chinese literature scholars that texts be read only within an "uncontaminated" Chinese frame. (6) This demand disallows both the modern, noncanonical texts that are the objects of her interest, and her critical apparatus, informed by Western theory. Jose Piedra chafes at his friend's characterization of him as someone who "explains Spanish America to the gringos, of whom [he is] almost one." (7) Both Piedra and Chow are asked to occupy the space of "self as "other": the "authentic" Chinese or Spanish American, constituted as Other in the discourse of academic literary analysis. Piedra's response is to reify the categories of self and other, and to insist that each reader occupy his or her appropriate space. He is (with good reason) concerned with the colonizing Self who swoops down and appropriates the interpretation of the Other for the Self's own (Self-ish) purposes. For Piedra, the Other has both morally and epistemically privileged access to the object of study.
Rey Chow, however, refuses to accept her own "othering," destabilizing the overly simple binary oppostion of self and other by positing an intermediate position. (8) Chow demonstrates how identity on demand is necessarily a falsification, an ideal projection into the past. She calls herself the "ethnic critic," that is, the one who breaks the illusion of uniformity of the culture in which she lives. To be ethnic means to be the product of cultural exchange and societal diversity.
For his part, Piedra does, finally, allow for a sympathetic outsider who reads his culture in solidarity with him. One such will be Doris Sommer, who clarifies her position with an autobiographical preface to her book on what she calls Latin America's "foundational" novels. Once this apparently dominant-group, and potentially colonizing, reader of the Latin American text...
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