Postcolonial Otobiography

Abstract

Abstract The chapter examines Édouard Louis’ second novel, Histoire de la violence (2016) against the backdrop of the writer’s declarations about the anxiety he experienced while writing the book, illuminating the implicit and explicit risks that French White writers face when engaging with race and colonial history. Reading the text through the concept of otobiography (Jacques Derrida), a literary form predicated on the cleaving of the narrating subject in which telling oneself is inextricably linked to a listening process itself resulting in a breach of interiority, the analysis retraces the appropriation of the Kabyle character’s story into Louis’ self-reflection. While challenging the universalist expectations of a predominantly White French readership, the text fails to deconstruct Whiteness, thus becoming symptomatic of White-authored autobiographical or autofictional explorations which are ultimately reluctant to delve into their intimate experience and genuinely engage with the unacknowledged ethno-racial hierarchy at the core of French society.