Transnational memories of the self: Reflections on postcommunist and postcolonial life-writing by women

This dissertation explores contemporary memoirs in English by transnational women authors writing during the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century. Centered on questions of language as primary identity marker, my analysis follows these authors' identity construction within a postcommunist and postcolonial cultural landscape. I bring postcommunist and postcolonial memoirs together under the sign of minor transnationalism (Francoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih) as critical praxis reflective of geopolitical marginality. It is a premise of this inquiry that much of contemporary postcommunist and postcolonial literature is the product of writing outside an original home country and nation state. Indeed, what is at stake is precisely the understanding of the role of the autobiographical enterprise initiated by a need for responding to and reflecting upon a collective history left behind through a personal odyssey and recuperated through the act of writing itself. I perceive this life-writing as defined by migration and displacement, often culminating in a sense of complex deterritorialization of the self that ultimately transcends the national space through a migrant rhetoric and poetics of its own.;Rather than favoring a positioning of so-called Third World voices vis-a-vis, yet again, the hegemonic others, what Sara Suleri calls "the devastating rhetoric of 'us and them,'" the concept of minor transnationalism seeks the possibility of a dialogue and coalition among those historically designated as the globally marginal. While the "minor" in the term minor transnationalism remains reflective of Deleuze and Guattari's original definition of a minor literature written in a major language, the emphasis in this case falls upon a minor status understood in geopolitical terms: the countries represented by these memoirs remain outside the Western Hemisphere. As Lionnet argues, "it is only by imagining nonhierarchical modes of relation among cultures" that we can avoid reiterating those "exclusionary practices" that have dominated Western thought throughout most of its history. A more mutual dialogue can be facilitated thus between countries in the Second World (i.e. former communist countries in East-Central Europe) and countries in the Third World within a post-Cold War political climate marked by the demise of the Soviet Union, a historical change comparable in significance to the end of colonial rules.