Speaker: Jocelyn Stitt (Gender & Women's Studies, Minnesota State University; IRWG Visiting Scholar)

Recent years have seen a boom in the publication of life writing. The popularity of blogs and various forms of social media, which comprise a kind of micro-autobiographical form, suggests that we live in an age of autobiography. However, not all life stories receive equal attention. What does life writing look like outside of North American and European frameworks?

Jocelyn Stitt’s project, "Mapping Home: Diaspora, Creolized Citizenship, and the Gendered Making of Caribbean Space" brings together intense scholarly conversations from feminist autobiographical theory and Caribbean literary studies about belonging, space, nation, and subaltern writing.

This talk begins with an exploration of mapping of the Caribbean as an important tool for colonial control and then moves to examining how contemporary Caribbean women writers reclaim that space through the use of the autobiographical genre. The deployment within the last fifteen years of the autobiographical form by major writers better known for their poetry, prose, and theory (Lorna Goodison, Maryse Condé, Jamaica Kincaid, Staceyann Chin, Edwidge Danticat, Ruth Behar, Saidya Hartman, and Dionne Brand) is not simply a response to market demand, but a recognition of the liberatory possibilities of this genre to combine personal and national history within the same discursive space. Autobiography as used by these writers is a technology that enables a narrative counter-mapping that connects the specific lived experience of women in the Caribbean to broader histories of slavery, colonization, sovereignty, and globalization.