Autobiography

Debates such as these over the slipperiness of autobiography as a genre have led contemporary scholars to turn to the increasingly complex production and reception of autobiographical "outlaw genres," which call attention to how generic distinctions have always been troubled, fluid, and contestable. In "Resisting Autobiography: Out-Law Genres and Transnational Feminist Subjects" (1992), Caren Kaplan argues that hybrid autobiographical forms constitute strategic political moves for women, ethnic, and immigrant authors who do not wish to write their lives according to culturally available scripts. Moreover, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson's edited collection Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography (1996), broadens conceptions of autobiography past purely written forms into everyday cultural practices that are in fact identity practices. These scholars point out that contemporary "autobiographical" texts call into question the generic boundaries between fiction, autobiography, biography, ethnography, myth, and performance. Authors are increasingly labeling their works "biomythography" (Audre Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, 1982), "fictional autobioethnography" (Norma Elia Cantú's Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera, 1995), and other generic hybrids, and many authors are combining text with images and drawings that call attention to the visual as a self-representational practice. For example, Art Spiegelman's two-volume Maus: A Survivor's Tale (1986 and 1991) uses a comic book or "graphic novel" form in order to explore Spiegelman's troubled relationship with his father, a survivor of Auschwitz, and his life story. Cherríe Moraga's Loving in the War Years: lo que nunca pasó por sus labios (1983) and Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) combine personal essays and poems with history and feminist theory in English and Spanish to create hybrid forms that are both autobiographical and academic. And Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's multimedia Dictee (1982) draws on autobiography, biography, photographs, drawings, and cinema in order to explore the challenges of immigration for the Korean-American narrator and her mother.

Outlaw genres suggest that autobiography is moving from a generally textual narrative form into a range of complex oral, textual, visual, and performative cultural practices that explore the challenges of identity and self-representation in diverse ways and through diverse media. Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña's autobiographical performance art is one striking example of contemporary attempts to expand self-representation beyond textual forms. In Year of the White Bear: Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West (1992), Fusco and Gómez-Peña, dressed up as exotic tribal figures from an unnamed and "undiscovered" island, displayed themselves in a cage in London, Madrid, and New York. Counting on their audiences' familiarity with the colonial practice of putting native peoples on display for Western audiences, Fusco and Gómez-Peña were surprised by the extent to which their performance, intended as a satire of popular nineteenth-century cultural expositions that presented cultural tribes as specimens, was taken literally and as truth by audiences. This ironic performance of racialized identity goes to the heart of questions of truth, authenticity, and audience expectations in "nonfictional" self-representational acts. It also illustrates the continuing need for autobiography to be theorized complexly and rhetorically, especially in the contemporary global landscape in which texts cross national, cultural, and language boundaries with ever-increasing frequency.