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192 pages, Paperback
First published August 20, 2020
HopeRoad was founded in 2010 by Rosemarie Hudson who has always wanted to encourage exciting new talent, publish those authors herself and bring them to our attention. Her emphasis has been to promote the best writing from and about Africa, Asia and the Caribbean, with themes of identity, cultural stereotyping, disability and injustices are of particular interest.
Since the beginning of 2019, Rosemarie has been joined by Pete Ayrton, editor and publisher, who in 1986 founded Serpent’s Tail, the cutting-edge publisher he retired from in 2016. Pete Ayrton will be heading up Small Axes, a new imprint that will focus on republishing out of print post-colonial classics that helped to shape cultural shifts at the time and remain as relevant today as when they were first published.
The narrative is largely based on Ernaux's own life but she uses 'we' not 'I', or 'she' when specifically referring to herself: her personal memories (auto) are used to both tell her own life story and her evolution as a writer, but also to then describe the collective experience (biography) of her friends and indeed the generation of French women to which she belongs.
The issue is that it is only part of that generation, as it is also those from the same social class, ethnic group and even artistic inclination as the author as well.
To be fair the book doesn’t suggest otherwise but one knows full well that is this was by a black Muslim lesbian woman (say) people would label the book as about that specific experience. Whereas here by default this is treated as a history of French women (and white, heterosexual, atheist from a Catholic background etc don’t get added as qualifiers).
I realized that my problem was not only that I was a woman, but also that I was a French-born only child of Algerian immigrants. I was a lesbian Muslim woman. French feminist discourse couldn’t encompass my particularities or comprehend the quotidian layers of discrimination existing side by side. They weren’t talking about my life. That was a brutal realization. But there were alternatives: not one feminism, but varied feminisms. This was an intersectional feminism of the everyday. I can’t discuss feminism without considering social class, especially when faced with the current critiques of “wokeness” here in France.