Mourning as a Resistance Trope. Trauma, History, and Memory in Indian Ocean Life Writing: An Introduction

Postcolonial literary criticism has recently focused its scrutiny on life writing, that is, the memoirs and experiences of citizens from former colonized countries. The subsidiary status that autobiography was granted within the field of literary criticism has long been contested by the current inscription of life writing as a fecund and insightful area of research as numerous academic studies testify to (Smith and Watson 2010; Harlow 1987). Although the first critical inception of autobiographical studies veered around the construction of an Enlightenment persona, that is to say, a rational, sovereign subject, usually male and invariably white, we wish to highlight that alongside the formation of this persistently white and male individual, another line of autobiographical studies was developing. This centred on those selves that due to gender and/or race could not accommodate to the Enlightenment ideals of subjecthood. Thus, women’s autobiographical writings, on the one hand, and slave narratives, on the other, questioned the maleness and whiteness of the rational Enlightenment self to the extent that, as James Olney Jr. states in relationship with the African-American literary tradition, autobiographical writing via slave narratives is to be considered the first distinctive manifestation of written literature produced by black America (Olney Jr. 1988). Autobiography emerges as a resisting genre which embraces the life stories of people that were regarded as inherently inferior and of little interest and hence has strategically moved them from the colonial margin to the postcolonial centre.