Multilingual Life Writing by French and Francophone Women

Dr. Natalie Edwards is Associate Professor of French at the University of Adelaide, Australia. She specializes in women’s writing, life writing and translingual writing in French. She is the author of Shifting Subjects: Plural Subjectivity in Contemporary Francophone Women’s Autobiography (2011) and Voicing Voluntary Childlessness: Narratives of Non-Mothering in French (2016). She is co-editor of Textual and Visual Selves: Photography, Film and Visual Art in French Autobiography (2011) and Framing French Culture (2015) and of ten edited volumes on contemporary French and Francophone literatures.

"Edwards’s nuanced approach avoids ‘white reading’, offering parallel interpretations which acknowledge those readers who share the author’s multilingualism… the decolonizing ambition of this work should be praised and is, for the most part, highly successful. Edwards’s conclusion powerfully captures the importance of translanguaging in an increasingly plurilingual and mobile world; moreover, it is a practice which is intersectional in its scope and interdisciplinary in its application, thus perhaps hailing a new paradigm for women’s lifewriting research."- Jasmine Cooper, Newnham College, Cambridge

• Introduction Chapter 1 Lydie Salvayre: Translanguaging, Testimony and History Chapter 2French-Vietnamese Translanguaging in the Work of Kim Thúy Chapter 3"En Australie, je parle une langue minoritaire": Catherine Rey’s Franco-Australian Life-Writing Chapter 4Gisèle Pineau’s Evolving Translanguaging: From Un Papillon dans la cité to L’Exil selon Julia to Mes quatres femmes Chapter 5Staging Resistance to the Language of the Colonizer: Chantal Spitz’s Translanguaging Chapter 6Hélène Cixous’s Franco-German Translanguaging in Une Autobiographie allemande Conclusion