In-between Wor(l)ds: Female Autofiction and Postcolonial Identity in Marie Cardinal’s Au pays de mes racines, Marguerite Duras’s L’amant and Isabela Figueiredo’s Caderno de Memórias Coloniais

Female autofiction can be considered a form of feminist confessional since, by challenging dominant configurations of knowledge and drawing attention to women’s personal issues, it aims at articulating the multiplicity of the female narrative subject. Autofictional works such as Marie Cardinal’s Au pays de mes racines, Marguerite Duras’s L’amant and Isabela Figueiredo’s Caderno de Memórias Coloniais can therefore be viewed as dealing with female concerns in a political way. This is because their exploration of women’s marginal status in formerly colonial countries functions as an empowering tool through which they challenge the structures of domination impinging on their identity while asserting their own individuality. The purpose of this dissertation is to explore how the literary genre of autofiction serves to better articulate issues of female subjectivity and cultural hybridization, particularly as concerns the narratives’ transcultural power dynamics. The focus will be on the fragmented sense of self imbuing these novels and which is directly related to the culturally liminal status occupied by the narrators. The final objective is to investigate how the notion of inbetweenness, underlying both the genre of autofiction itself and the structure of the texts, functions as a feminist category of representation of women’s subjectivity