Remembering Beyond Africanity: Displaying Postcolonial Identities in “African” and “European” Childhood Accounts.

Based on two works in French and two others in German, this paper shows how memory-related practices in childhood accounts display postcolonial identities. The aim is to question the “Africanity” of African-authored literary autobiographies and to elaborate cross-cultural and cross-historical aspects of literary autobiographies of the 20th and 21st centuries by means of comparative analysis. This is done on the basis of the analysis of narrative techniques and properties that postcolonial theory has defined as characteristic of “African” literature, but which I elaborate in equal measure in the autobiographies treated from Africa and Europe. The literary narrative techniques analyzed are considered postcolonial due to their cross-cultural status. The emphasis starts from the debate on the cultural characteristics of African and European works. The discussion is on the singularity of autobiographical writing in Africa where it developed after its emergence in Europe. It is therefore a question of assessing this assumption in the light of the selected works and of proving that the narrative and writing techniques used are by no means to be regarded as exclusivities of literary texts by authors of African origin. Because of their cross-border and cross-linguistic dimension, L’Enfant noir (Guinea), La Marseillaise de mon enfance (Cameroon), Die gerettete Zunge (Austria) and Steppenrutenpflanze (Switzerland) can be associated with 1 postcolonial identity constructions. Other postcolonial textual features discussed in this paper are intertextuality, orality and the representative function of the narrator. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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