Autobiography

Contemporary philosophers and cultural critics have convincingly argued that identity and experience are themselves socially constructed, shifting according to historical and cultural ideas about personhood and everyday life. Despite this postmodern turn to thinking about how identity is made, not born, scholars of autobiography nevertheless insist on the materiality of identity in theorizing life writing, particularly the material consequences of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and ability, and how autobiographical narratives are affected by culturally available identity categories and narratives. From Sei Shōnagon's The Pillow Book (Japan, c. 1000 C.E.) to Margery Kempe's The Book of Margery Kempe (England, 1436) to Benjamin Franklin's The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (United States, 1771–1789) to Richard Rodriguez's immigration memoir Hunger of Memory (United States, 1982), identity and narrative provide key frames through which autobiographers negotiate their life stories. For example, Shōnagon's notebooks, containing observations, poems, and stories written by a tenth-century Japanese woman, differ in many ways from Franklin's archetypal autobiography, which reveals his investment in white male privilege in the early U.S. republic. Nevertheless both autobiographies show that "self-life-writing" is a process that is historically and culturally situated, and through which identity and experience are negotiated, materialized, and refashioned.

Significantly Franklin's Autobiography relies on a larger cultural narrative, the bildungsroman, which has widely accepted currency in the United States. The bildungsroman follows a classic narrative trajectory of conversion in which the individual hero embarks on a long journey that ends with his resolution with the larger social community—in Franklin's case, the national community as represented by Philadelphia. The bildungsroman provides narrative shape and truth-value to a wide range of mainstream and marginal autobiographies published in the United States, from Franklin's to Mary Antin's The Promised Land (1912), Jade Snow Wong's Fifth Chinese Daughter (1950), Malcolm X and Alex Haley's The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), and Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory. The fact that several immigrant, ethnic, and women autobiographers have relied on the bildungsroman to give their stories a recognizable trajectory and broad cultural currency is no accident. Indeed many autobiographers have used this form deliberately and strategically in order to persuade their readers that they too deserve a place of privilege in the United States and that their achievement of the "American Dream" is a result of individual hard work and intelligence. Therefore many autobiographies that are shaped by the bildungsroman narrative downplay structural inequities such as gender, ethnicity, race, class, sexuality, and ability. Wong and Rodriguez, for example, openly dispute the assumption that gender or ethnicity has served as a barrier in their lives, even when their autobiographies clearly show otherwise. The bildungsroman, then, is a form that both enables and constrains the kinds of life stories that can be told by particular autobiographers.

Narratives of mobility and/or immobility structure a wide variety of autobiographies that bring into view questions concerning the representation of the racialized, gendered, and classed body. Unlike the heroic journey narrative of the bildungsroman, which relies on an individualized story of social mobility, many autobiographical narratives of mobility and immobility engage questions of community, belonging, and citizenship and their relationship to how the freedoms of particular bodies are granted or restricted. For example, the slave narrative articulates the broad cultural, economic, and historical forces that compelled racialized subjects into slavery in the United States, Britain, and the British colonies. Frederick Douglass's The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) gained wide influence in the United States in the nineteenth century for its indictment of white slave owners whose personal and political freedom depended upon the forced servitude of an entire class of people. Slave narratives by female slaves, such as Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) and Mary Prince's The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave (1831), added to this an exploration of how gender also operated to the advantage of white men in the slave economy. An examination of slave narratives, then, exposes the abstract narrative of individual social mobility in bildungsroman narratives to be a patent fiction and shows instead how race, gender, and class privilege operate to enable or constrain particular bodies and particular life narratives.

Likewise other autobiographical narratives structured by the dynamics of immobility or restricted mobility provide key insights into how society is constructed around gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and ability. For example, early American captivity narratives told the story of American Indians' supposed savagery and white women's supposed civility. For example, Mary Rowlandson's A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682), perhaps the most famous of the captivity narratives, creates a solid opposition between white settlers and native "savages," arguing in the process that the settlers, not the natives, have God-given authority over the American wilderness. In contrast, prison memoirs and Japanese-American internment narratives illustrate the racial and class dynamics that constrain the movement of individuals who are deemed by the state to be a danger to the citizenry. In one of the most famous internment narratives, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston's Farewell to Manzanar (1973), the narrator describes the racialization process by which Japanese immigrants and citizens were reconstructed as enemies of the state solely on the basis of their ethnicity and without regard to their citizenship status or national loyalties. Similarly prison memoirs such as Alexander Berkman's Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist (1912) and Against All Hope: The Prison Memoirs of Armando Valladares (1986) expose how race and class factor into a supposedly impartial criminal justice system. As these autobiographies illustrate, mobility and immobility are intricately tied to social constructions of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and citizenship status and differ radically depending upon one's privilege or lack thereof. The choice to write an autobiography shaped by the form of the slave narrative, the captivity narrative, the prison narrative, or the internment narrative is likewise a choice with a range of political and rhetorical effects and is not simply a neutral or self-evident choice. Likewise immigration narratives provide a culturally intelligible form for many autobiographies and call attention to the ways in which "citizen," "alien," and "immigrant" are shifting and socially constructed categories. Immigration narratives sometimes draw on other culturally available narratives such as the bildungsroman, as we have seen with Jade Snow Wong and Richard Rodriguez. But other immigration autobiographies resist the individualist trajectory of the bildungsroman by explicitly challenging the terms by which the nation-state defines "citizen" and "Other." For example, in Judith Ortiz Cofer's Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood (1990), the concept of La Tristeza, "the sadness that only place induces and only place cures" (p. 14), functions as a poignant way to theorize the pain of immigration and displacement. In Ernesto Galarza's Barrio Boy: The Story of a Boy's Acculturation (1971), the narrator constructs his life as a series of lessons in coming to gender, ethnic, and class consciousness. Self-consciously portraying his life as historically and psychologically representative of all Mexican immigrants to the United States, Galarza resists the psychological characterization of Chicanos as lacking "self-image" (p. 2) and insists that his identity, like his autobiography, is profoundly affected both by his childhood in Jalcocotán and by his participation in the U.S. Chicano labor movement of the 1960s.

The case of immigrant and ethnic autobiography brings up another issue that informs the study of self-life-writing: namely, the question of who can speak for whom. The politics of collaboration, editing, and translation inform much ethnic life writing throughout U.S. history as well as earlier and non-U.S. autobiographies such as Margery Kempe's Book, over which questions about the author's literacy continue to throw her status as autobiographer into doubt. In the U.S. context, a primary example of the politics of who can speak for whom is the history of nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century Native-American autobiographies, many of which were produced collaboratively between the native subject and a white ethnographer. For example, The Life of Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak, or Black Hawk (1833), transcribed and edited by J. B. Patterson, and Black Elk Speaks (1932), transcribed and edited by John G. Neihardt, are both as-told-to autobiographies that call attention to the politics of cross-cultural representation, translation, and authorial agency. But the collaborative autobiography continues into the late twentieth century and on to the present day with classics such as The Autobiography of Malcolm X and the contemporary testimonio of Rigoberta Menchú, I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala (1984), transcribed and edited by Elisabeth Burgos-Debray.

Menchú's testimonio, published and circulated in North America, calls for attention to the contemporary politics of globalization and the transnational production, circulation, and reception of life narratives in the "First World" about "Third World" subjects. But testimonio also differs from conventional autobiography. As Doris Sommer argues, whereas autobiography generally tells the story of an individualized "I" and its unique experiences, in testimonio the "I" becomes plural and stands in for a community of people who share a common identity and representative, rather than unique, experiences. In Menchú's case, this plural "I" has renewed public and scholarly interest in the question of "truth" in autobiography, as she has been accused of misrepresenting "her" experiences for aesthetic and political gain.