Locating subjects: Contemporary Canadian and Australian autobiography

The central argument of this dissertation is that discourses of place shape autobiographical subjectivity. Drawing primarily on the work of postcolonial and feminist critics, but also on certain insights of social theorists and cultural geographers, this study reconsiders the ways in which the autobiographical subject has been conventionally theorized as an "unlocated" subject. By arguing that place is not just empty, neutral background, the project seeks to correct this a-spatial bias and argues for readings of autobiography that always take the subject's relation to specific places into account. This dissertation. focuses on contemporary autobiographies by Canadians and Australians, both aboriginal and non-aboriginal. It considers how colonial and nationalist discourses inscribe these places and render them problematic sites of identification for particular subjects.;Opening with a chapter that examines how autobiography studies has been preoccupied with a subject that is produced solely with reference to either history or language, this study moves on to consider three material sites that figure prominently in the process of subject formation: the body, the home, and the neighbourhood. Chapter two explores bodies as sites of psychic investment and discursive inscription in Jane Willis's Geneish: An Indian Girlhood and David Malouf's 12 Edmonstone Street, and argues that discourses of race produce a Native female body and an ethnic male body as alien and unaccommodated. Chapter three takes up the vexed issue of home in settler postcolonial writing and explores how two white autobiographers--Gabrielle Roy and Jill Ker Conway--construct themselves as marginal subjects within nations where masculinist and/or Anglophone norms have shaped the dominant society. One of the arguments of this dissertation is that autobiography participates in the broader political project of decolonization, and chapter four investigates two aboriginal texts--Sally Morgan's My Place and Lee Maracle's Bobbi Lee: Indian Rebel--that signal how the work of decolonization in Canada and Australia might proceed. This chapter also reimagines Canadian and Australian subjectivity in terms of the multicultural neighbourhood and proposes a spatial model that allows for heterogeneity within the notion of the subject and fosters communication and collaboration across cultural differences.