From Split to Screened Selves. French and Francophone Autobiography in the Third Person

GABARA, Rachel, From Split to Screened Selves. French and Francophone Autobiography in the Third Person, Stanford University Press, 2006, 232 pp.

ISBN : 0804753563

This book is a study of recent autobiographies by French and Francophone African writers and filmmakers, all of whom reject simple first-person narration and experiment with narrative voice and form to represent fragmented subjectivity. Gabara investigates autobiography across media, from print to photography and film, as well as across the colonial encounter, from France to Francophone North and West Africa. Reading works by Roland Barthes, Nathalie Sarraute, Assia Djebar, Cyril Collard, David Achkar, and Raoul Peck, she argues that autobiographical film and African autobiography, subgenres that have until now been overlooked or dismissed by critics, offer new and important possibilities for self-representation in the twenty-first century. Not only do these new forms of autobiography deserve our attention, but any study of contemporary autobiography is incomplete without them.

Rachel Gabara is Assistant Professor in the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Georgia.