Présentation des sessions > Session 4: Récits de femmes

Session 4: Récits de femmes

 Vendredi 23 Juin, 9h30-11h00

Animé par : Judith Misahi Barak

Nadia Mounchit: Dire l'intime en situation d'entretien : se dire et se risquer ?

S’intéresser au lien conjugal en migration implique d’avoir un accès aux parcours migratoires et pour ce faire, la conduite de l’entretien biographique avec les principaux concernés constitue une voie certainement productive. Prenant les formes anodines de la conversation, l’entretien soumet l’informateur à un exercice d’introspection dans un espace-temps où la mise en récit est exposée à des filtres variés : celui du regard rétrospectif sur un passé migratoire pouvant être mythifié (Sirna 2009 : 17-18) et celui de l’affect dans un champ - conjugal - qui en est pour le moins chargé, jouant sur la perception des évènements passés (Antoine et al.). Dès lors, la situation d’entretien, non seulement sollicite les subjectivités mais les active, voire les déplace. En témoignent les états (et actions) de soulagement, de fierté ou d’implication produits à l’issue de l’entretien mais aussi de rétractation lorsque parfois la parole, immédiate et non récupérable, s’avère « dangereuse » (Barthes 1981 : 10). A partir de l’expérience d’entretiens menés, dans le cadre d’une thèse en sociologie, avec des femmes d’Afrique de l’Ouest et centrale immigrées en France, il s’agira de se pencher sur les effets concrets de la production de ce « matériau langagier » (Demazière 2007) qu’est l’entretien biographique. Nous montrerons comment la situation d’entretien constitue alors un espace-tiers, entre ici et là-bas, entre avenir et passé, où l’informatrice, mise face à son histoire et à elle-même en tant que sujet, est amenée à se situer et à se mettre en jeu.

 

Suzanne Scafe: Remembering “political blackness” as a space for agency and transformation in contemporary Black British women’s life-writing archives.

Remembering “political blackness” as a space for agency and transformation in contemporary Black British women’s life-writing archives. This paper focuses on the life-writing narratives of Black women involved in Black women’s groups and the Black women’s movement during the 1970s and ‘80s and examines its reconfiguration of Black as a connecting, oppositional identity. In the context of these political organisations and their memorialisation in contemporary oral history archives, migrant and diasporic identities are shown to be provisional and mobile. The life-writing narratives and oral history interviews situate their first and second generation migrant subjects in political contexts that use the identification ‘black British’ to designate ‘an “imagined community” comprising Caribbean, African, and South Asian experience in Britain’, whose presence reflected its historical entanglement and the continued movement of populations between colonial territories and the metropolitan centre. (Procter,2000, 5). ‘Black’ also defined a culturally ‘united front against an increasingly explicit racialised white national community’, and was/is used as an aesthetic signifier of difference.

I use the narratives contained in the Sisterhood and After archive and the Black Cultural Archives, both of which use life-writing interviewing methods and in this way demonstrate the intersection of the personal and the political that defined the women’s movement of the 1970s and ‘80s. These texts suggest the inadequacy of diaspora as a signifier of identity; the problematic nature of ‘blackness’ as a ‘point for creating and mobilizing solidarities’ and as an ‘epithet that can suffocate and flatten distinctions of racialization and class’ (Gunaratnam 2014, p. 4). These narratives demonstrate that ‘political blackness’ is a travelling identity that both retains and exceeds historical, geographical and cultural markers. In this paper I suggest that such fluidity is productive, producing both political and social change as well as personal transformation.

 

Susan Ball: Contingency of middle class women’s transcultural places of living

This paper takes as its starting point the premise that research undertaken from a biographical perspective is an essential means by which to recognise contingency and thereby escape from the social reductionism of much work on migration. The focus of the paper is on the contingency of the places within which middle class migrant women create meaning and devise strategies for their lives. The research is based on semi-structured life course interviews with 35 native English speakers who have lived in the centre or east of Paris for 15 years or more. The majority of these women migrated in their mid-20s and have since raised families in the city. The characteristic components of the interview situation (Wengraf, 2001) and the interviewer’s insider-outsider status (Voloder and Kirpitchenko, 2014) are outlined. Using an approach sensitive to the role of social relations in the making of place (Massey, 2005), the interviews are examined in order to identify interviewees’ references to transcultural places of living (Hoerder 2012, Wessendorf, 2014) at self-identified life stages. Many of the interviewees’ ease with the narrative form also means that the interviews can be examined so as to uncover some of the tacit and unconscious norms of Anglophone, middle class, migrant women living in Paris. The analysis shows that far from being a socially reductionist ‘lost generation’ – this time, lost between the generation at the point of departure and that of their hybrid children – middle class migrant women’s narratives highlight the contingency of the social relations comprising the transcultural homes and communities from which they came and which they have (re)created in Paris.

-       its use of biographical interviews means that it is relevant to work on migration narratives and migrant subjectivities;

-        its use of a transcultural approach means that it is relevant to work addressing third space, hybrid places or ecotones of migrant living; and

-        its life course approach means that it uncovers references to places of living at different life stages.

Personnes connectées : 1