Entre médiation, tiraillement et éclatement, la crise identitaire de l’écrivain-narrateur d’autobiographie intellectuelle

Abstract

This article analyzes the tensions that inhabit the writer engaged in an exercise of intellectual autobiography. The study is in particular applied to a postcolonial corpus and more precisely to a set of authors’ texts characterized by a certain cultural hybridization, whether this involved a migration route or not. As a counterpoint to these works with political, poetic and sociological dimensions, reading Roland Barthes opens up the field of linguistic considerations. Starting from a problematization that is both semiological and literary, the articulation is articulated in three stages. It is first a question of questioning the way in which, for each of the texts, the autobiographical language gives shape to the “I” by inscribing the story in a carnal dimension. Attention is then paid to the inscription of a dialectical “I” in the political history of Africa and its diasporas, but also in the scriptural and literary world. The last point addresses the third dimension of enunciation as a space for the deployment of a torn identity. If, in the background, the texts bring out the concept of intellectual autobiography as a writing of resistance by authors to their own ideas, they also suggest the possibility, for each of the author-narrators, of overcoming or thwarting this resistance by hanging on what some of them call “third space”.

Keywords

• autobiography
• intellectual autobiography
• decolonization
• postcolonial studies
• francophonie
• dialogic pact