Western Autobiography and Colonial Discourse: An Overview

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. The lack of explicit naming of the Donatists has caused some discussion. As well as the proposition that it is a deliberate strategy to avoid antagonising Augustine's most redoubtable opponents, at a time when he was still too weak to challenge them directly, it has also been suggested that his dispute with Donatism was so well-known that it did not need to be spelled out here. It has even been argued that Augustine was unable to attack Donatism directly because some of his immediate family belonged to the sect. 2. For a more detailed discussion of issues of (post)colonialism in Augustine's text, see Moore-Gilbert, ‘Saint Augustine’. 3. For more detailed discussion of the relationship between Montaigne's self-fashioning and colonial discourse, see Moore-Gilbert, ‘New Worlds’. 4. The original describes the ‘effroi que j'eusse naturellement de ce visage de pain d’épice’ (a ginger-bread face), a more precise and – perhaps ambivalent – phrasing than ‘swarthy countenance’ (Oeuvres 67). 5. For an account of Rousseau's important engagements with Orientalism in his later life, see Moore-Gilbert, ‘Autobiography’.