Finding a Voice

In making a claim for women's agency within the academy, Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz writes, “those feminist authors who most successfully argue from a personal point of view are typically making a simultaneous claim that their lives are revealing about some larger, if not universal, truths.” Her examples are principally women of color, and she goes on to argue that “feminism, then, has opened up the space for the personal voice in scholarship; it has also pushed white feminists, in particular, to get beyond focusing on asserted similarities between women, to change our courses and our research to reflect the diversity of women's experiences.” Chilla Bulbeck, for example, suggests that “Feminists who resist orientalism … wish to put the means of recourse into the hands of women, but not white women. We seek to abjure dichotomies that divide ‘us’ and ‘them’ into incommensurable categories; we wish to avoid maternalism and speaking ‘for’ other women,” because to do so would confirm a stereotype of them as simply passive victims.

At the same time, in important anthologies, like Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson's Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader and Teresa de Lauretis's Feminist Studies, Critical Studies, the special demands made by readers of autobiographies written by women are laid bare and, in many cases, offered as examples not only of an unequal playing field but also, perhaps more productively, as occasions for a redefinition of the genre. Writing in 1986, Nancy K. Miller asks, “On what grounds can we remodel the relations of a female subject to the social text?” and she responds that “future feminist intervention requires an ironic manipulation of the semiotics of performance and production.” In this chapter, I would like to suggest that such “manipulation” can take unexpected and challenging forms when enacted by an African woman who has migrated from her community of birth, and that the challenge is not only to men. Such hermeneutical conundrums move beyond issues of gender to those of race and class, especially when the autobiographer is not a Westerner, and when she is writing about the country of her birth but doing so beyond the borders of that country.