First-person displacement. The figure of the writer in Djina and Lara Pawson

Abstract

This article examines the public figure of the writer as it emerges in interviews with the Angolan writer Djina and the British writer Lara Pawson, conducted within a comparative research project on literary voices on the margins in Angola and Chile. Focusing on displacement as both an empirical and epistemic condition, it explores how these writers’ practices challenge dominant cosmopolitan paradigms grounded in continuity and fluidity, proposing instead a territorialized and tension-filled transnationalism. Drawing on Edward Said’s distinction between the professional and the amateur intellectual, the article argues that both authors perform a mode of authorship that resists institutional authority and expertise. Through an analysis of the interviews as performative events, it identifies three key features: the anchoring of discourse in embodied experience, the activation of affect as an epistemic resource, and a dialogical mode of enunciation that displaces authorial authority. This gives rise to a “displaced first person,” through which subjectivity becomes a site for collective knowledge production rather than individual validation.