The Postcolonial as Vanishing Point: Les Années by Annie Ernaux (2024)

Fictions of Race in Contemporary French Literature: French Writers, White Writing

Étienne Achille andOana Panaïté

Published:

2024

Online ISBN:

9780191996993

Print ISBN:

9780198893134

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Fictions of Race in Contemporary French Literature: French Writers, White Writing

Étienne Achille andOana Panaïté

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Étienne Achille,

Étienne Achille

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Oana PanaÏtÉ

Pages

59–78

  • Published:

    March 2024

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Achille, Étienne, and Oana PanaÏtÉ, 'The Postcolonial as Vanishing Point: Les Années by Annie Ernaux', Fictions of Race in Contemporary French Literature: French Writers, White Writing (Oxford, 2024; online edn, Oxford Academic, 21 Mar. 2024), https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198893134.003.0004, accessed 7 May 2024.

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Abstract

This chapter argues that in Annie Ernaux’s Les Années (2008), the (post)colonial, although frequently interwoven in the subject’s personal story and the historical narrative it projects, represents a vanishing point, being as much seen, heard, and named as it is overlooked, muted, and miscalled. The (post)colonial brings together parallel narrative lines that seem completely disparate even as they recede or advance towards remote or proximal points of juncture. Yet, in contrast with the subject’s keen awareness of the colonial phenomena during the decades of decolonization, her espousal of a growing societal discourse around immigration and racism largely conceals or overlooks the colonial roots of these phenomena. In Ernaux’s ‘roman total’, the experience of silence and the state of non-belonging enhance the sense of tonal disconnection and temporal dislocation, shedding new light on the concept of ‘colonial aphasia’ and providing insight into the ways the colonial remains peripheral in social discourse.

Keywords: collective history, colonial aphasia, Annie Ernaux, individual memory, Les Années, postcolonial vanishing point, transpersonal autobiography

Subject

Literary Studies (European)

Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online

Fictions of Race in Contemporary French Literature: French Writers, White Writing. Étienne Achille and Oana Panaïté, Oxford University Press. © Étienne Achille and Oana Panaïté 2024.DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198893134.003.0004

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