Western Autobiography and Colonial Discourse: The Case of Rousseau's 'Orientalism'

Abstract

This essay argues that Autobiographical Studies has failed to appreciate sufficiently the importance of ethnicity in the construction of the western autobiographical subject. Taking a canonical figure of the genre, Rousseau-often, indeed, considered to be the inaugurator of modern western autobiography-it is argued that issues of ethnicity are crucial to this key writer's ways of imagining and narrating himself. It will be shown more particularly that Rousseau's engagements with non-western subjects are critical to Rousseau's narrativisation of the process of the formation of his gender and sexual identities. The emergence of autobiography is often considered to be one symptom of the advent of Modernity. To this extent, Modernity itself can be shown to be constituted by an engagement with issues of ethnicity at the micrological level of individuals' accounts of their own lives, as well as at the macrological level of allegedly objective new sciences such as ethnology and anthropology, which emerged during the Enlightenment.