Transnational Identities and Translated Agencies: From Madame de Staël’s Corinne, ou l’Italie (1807) to Kym Ragusa’s The Skin Between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty, and Belonging (2006)

This chapter considers the entwined legacy of nineteenth-century transnational women writers with women writing today through the paired case studies of Germaine de Staël (1766–1817) and Kym Ragusa (1966–). Transhistorical and transnational perspectives access new avenues of interpretation in women’s writing as genres, such as today’s autofiction, also define the identity exploration that women writers accomplished in nineteenth-century writing. Querying the parallel motivation that underpins the Genevan transplanted to Paris Staël’s Corinne, or Italy with Southern Italian-African American Ragusa’s The Skin Between Us, this essay peers in both directions across the two-hundred-year divide to examine the literary meditations, cultural commentaries, and travel narratives that reflect how these writers negotiate national boundaries, personal truths, and lived traumas to embrace what I call the translated agency of their transnational identities.