A politics of métissage: Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts Cover Image

A politics of métissage: Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts
A politics of métissage: Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts

Author(s): Shirin Akter Popy
Subject(s): Gender Studies, Ethnic Minorities Studies, Identity of Collectives, American Literature
Published by: Wydział Filologiczny Uniwersytetu w Białymstoku
Keywords: differences; relational self; politics of métissage; Maxine Hong Kingston; blending traditions;

Summary/Abstract: In her Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self Portraiture (1989), Françoise Lionnet identifies the life writing of women of color as the reflection of their heterogeneous differences and theorizes female autobiographical narratives as métissage. Métissage, nearly untranslatable, meaning “braiding,” views autobiography as an engagement of the author with history, myth, and cultures, and defines it as a braid of multiple voices and disparate forms. In The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976), Maxine Hong Kingston combines numerous voices into the (auto)biographical “I” as well as various forms in the narrative to express her identity as comprising manifold, different elements. In her life writing, she neither follows the unique self-representation propagated by male writers nor validates the inner personal tradition of women. Instead, breaking the fixities of thought and expression, she juxtaposes the historical with the mythical, the biographical with the autobiographical to form a language of resistance and solidarity. The present paper argues that by articulating her identity as a braid of differences, constructing self as a braid of multiple voices, and making her narrative a braid of multiple genres and traditions Kingston enacts her life writing as a politics of métissage.

  • Issue Year: 2021
  • Issue No: 04 (35)
  • Page Range: 17-27
  • Page Count: 11
  • Language: English