"I hope I was able to give him his story." Paradoxes and constraints of subordinates speaking out

By deploying an approach at the crossroads of literary criticism, philosophy and sociology of literature, this article illustrates the intersubjective dynamics that make possible and structure the self-narration of migrants in the so-called host society: an endeavour that is always situated between choice and constraint, emancipation and violence. Most critics have interpreted migrant literature as a form of counter-narrative to the public discourse on migration where the migrant is either deprived of the possibility of first-person enunciation or incited to tell her story in order to justify her presence, to reassure the host community, and to satisfy the curiosity of audiences eager for exoticism or real-life experiences. I show instead that this literature responds to a specific horizon of expectations and is caught up in a set of ambivalent social, publishing, and literary norms. Some writers in this corpus, however, elaborate practices of resistance as they thematize the interlocutory scene of personal narrative, enacting and parodying the constitutive and productive violence of the norms that frame the migrant's self-narrative.

Keywords: migrant literature; self-narrative; publishing market; authorial collaboration; narrative constraints; parody