Trajectoires trans-locales de l'imaginaire au féminin

Abstract

The appellation of migrant writing, one of the forms of decentering of Québécois literature since the decade of the 1980s, is called into question by critics, as well as by the creators. It is especially the closure of the corpus which obstructs reading that is being questioned, because it arranges, whereas one wanted to disturb or de-range. This article examines what critics, on the one hand, warn against in terms of this static nomination, and how, on the other hand, some women writers (Agnant, Chen, Farhoud, Milic´evic´, Werbowski, Shimazaki), reject the appellation, because for them, literature is worked out in imagination without borders. To illustrate their extra-literary remarks, we will examine briefly some of their works. This analysis will show that the themes of belonging and migrance have changed considerably since the 1980s. More and more, the works of the writers born abroad share the concerns of other local writers about matters of the self and of the self’s relation to the world, where the self thinks itself in a « trans-local » mode, a mode of « disquietude », which intends to keep its dynamic and changing movements within the literary.