Rewriting history, post-coloniality and feminism: Lee Maracle's autobiographical works
Year: 1994
Type: article
Abstract: Lee Maracle’s I Am Woman (1988) and Bobbi Lee. Indian Rebel \n(1990) are autobiographical works that rewrite the conventions of representing \nthe Native in the context of Canadian history and society. \nThrough her autobiographical “I”, Maracle narrates herself as \npoliticalrepresentative for women and for the Métis. \nThis essay aims to investigate Maracle’s political displacement of \nconventional representational practices. The importance of IAW&BLIR \nto revisionary historiography is that both works document the struggle \nof Natives today within a history of resistance. Writing from a position \nof “cultural siege”, “under occupation”, Maracle analyzes her position \nas a Native woman within an active struggle of decolonialization. Hers \nis a new history and historiography different from both white writing \non the Native and traditional Native “historical”, oral narratives. It is \nthe history of struggle in the 1960s and 1970s in a hybrid narrative \nmode. As we shall argue, this is history as narrating, as telling, in traditional \nnative fashion, but within recognizable dates and events and the \nconventions of “colonial” history.
Author: Esther Sánchez-Pardo González
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W16936785