Dr Antonia Wimbush

Languages, Cultures and Film

Research

Research Overview

My doctoral thesis explored the multiple aspects of exile, displacement, mobility, and identity as expressed in contemporary autofictional work written in French by women writers from across the francophone world. I drew on postcolonial theory, gender theory, and autobiographical theory to analyse texts by Nina Bouraoui (Algeria), Gisèle Pineau (Guadeloupe), Véronique Tadjo (Côte d’Ivoire), and Kim Lefèvre (Vietnam). The study concluded that these four female writers, whose experiences of mobility have been shaped by French colonialism, have adopted the genre of autofiction to express their exilic identity in their own unique ways. My forthcoming monograph, Autofiction: A Francophone Aesthetic of Exile, is revised from my doctoral thesis and incorporates the autofictional writing of Michèle Rakotoson and Abla Farhoud to investigate how the geographic, cultural, and political specificities of Madagascar and Quebec complicates expressions and articulations of exile.

In addition to my research expertise in exile and migration, I am interested in questions of gender, sexuality, and bodily experiences. I co-edited a special issue of L’Esprit Créateur with Dr Polly Galis and Dr Maria Tomlinson, entitled ‘Challenging Normative Spaces and Gazes: Imagining the Body in the Francophone World’. This special issue, which was published in June 2020, arose from an international, bilingual conference we organised in Birmingham in January 2018 on this theme. We are also publishing Queer(ying) Bodily Norms in Francophone Culture with Peter Lang in 2021, an edited which investigates questions of gender and sexuality in Francophone contexts.

I have written articles and book chapters on memory and trauma in contemporary Francophone women’s writing. Recent publications include an article for Journal of Romance Studies on literary representations of World War Two in Caribbean women’s writing and a book chapter which offers an ecocritical account of Véronique Tadjo’s latest novel, published in Transgression(s) in Twenty-First-Century Women’s Writing in French (2020).

From 2016 to 2019 I was the Conference Secretary for the Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies. I am currently co-editing a special issue of Francosphères entitled ‘Postcolonial Realms of Memory in the Francophone World’, following the conference organised on the same theme in November 2019.