Marking Auto/Biographical and Testimonial Literature as a Field of Inquiry in Postcolonial and Transnational Studies

Revisionary Narratives examines the historical and formal evolutions of Moroccan women's auto/biography in the last four decades, particularly its conflation with testimony and its expansion beyond literary texts. It analyzes auto/biographical and testimonial acts in Arabic, colloquial Moroccan Darija, French, and English in the fields of prison narratives, visual arts, theater performance, and digital media, situating them within specific sociopolitical and cultural contexts of production and consumption. Part One begins by tracing the rise of a feminist consciousness in prison narratives produced and/or published in the late 1970s through the 2000s. Part Two moves to analyzing the ubiquity of auto/biography and testimony in the arts and contemporary sociopolitical activism. The focus throughout the various case studies is women’s engagement with patriarchal and (neo-)imperial norms and practices as they relate to their experiences of political violence, activism, migration, and displacement. To understand why and how women collapse the boundaries between autobiography, biography, testimony, and sociopolitical commentary, the book employs a broad, transdisciplinary montage approach that combines theories on gender and autobiography and takes into account postcolonial, postmodern, transnational, transglobal, and translocal perspectives.

The primary purpose of this project is to mark auto/biography and testimony as a specific field of inquiry within the study of women's postcolonial cultural productions. The book builds on innovative explorations of recent developments of autobiographical discourse originating from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) which demonstrate that the expression of identity, self, selfhood, and subjectivity in contemporary autobiographical production offers important and personalized insights into the recent major sociocultural and political transformations in the region. The book further underlines the importance of Moroccan women's auto/biography and testimony to postcolonial and feminist studies within and beyond MENA sociocultural zones. It departs from previous studies that have traditionally analyzed Moroccan women's cultural productions within categories determined by language, media, and discipline, or within national boundaries. Instead, it emulates Moroccan women's practices and looks in multiple directions to examine the intersections between auto/biography, testimony, and gender. In particular, it brings into focus the construction of collective and individual subjects in the making, inflected by gender, spatial, cultural, linguistic, ethnic, ideological, socioeconomic, and religious differences.