Panel: Autobiographical Practices and Self-Disclosure
Copanelists: Susannah Mintz and Eugene Stelzig
This paper examines the various borderlands that mark the subject position of a formerly colonized ethnic woman scholar, and the process required to translate this borderland existence into life writing. Referencing Ien Ang’s definition of cultural studies, an area that “conceives of itself as a borderland formation, an open-ended and multivocal discursive formation” (On Not Speaking Chinese 2001), I suggest that borderlands—geographical, ideological, psychological, and rhetorical —liberate “self-referential and autobiographical writing” from the “moral requirements of declarative confession and self marking” (Judith Butler, “Collected and Fractured,” 1995). Borderland existence promises liberation from a past perceived as burdened with the inauthentic baggage of colonial acculturation. However, this liberation is predicated on ongoing negotiations when past and present confront each other not as a series of teleological events but as territorial conflicts. This ideological liberation and a testament to postcolonial consciousness can also be endangered when the impulse to write as-I-know-it is confronted by the aesthetic conditions that govern the genre of life writing. The emotional need to “write back,” if not postcolonially to the metropolitan centre, then to some personal psychological repository, is frequently checked by the life-long training of writing rationally. This process of translating is also challenged by the irony that a postcolonialist could find herself indulging in a nostalgic journey to a lost colonial past. Life writing, then, as practiced by an academic, becomes an anxiety-ridden borderland existence as one confronts one’s past. However, life writing, as translation and “a movement among languages,” is also an exchange that “poses a question for thinking the pluralization of community along non-nationalist and nonseparatist lines,” and is, therefore, the opposite of “self-totalizing” (Butler, “Collected and Fractured”).
Maria N. Ng is Associate Professor of English at the University of Lethbridge. She is the author of Three Exotic Views of Southeast Asia (EastBridge, 2002), and the co-editor of Reading Chinese Transnationalisms: Society, Literature, Film (Hong Kong UP, 2006), as well as essays on opera, masculinity, and Chinese identities. Ng researches gender and transnational identities, travel writing, and currently, life writing. She was awarded a Canada Council Grant for Professional Writers to write a memoir, Cultural Belongings, of colonial Hong Kong and Macau in the 60s and 70s.