Chapter 5: Autobiographical Heirs (Airs)--Cultural Studies and the Self

Autobiography as a genre has been a theoretical problem for literary critics, partly because it skirts fiction, overlps with it, can be social rather than individual, may contain more or less truth than fiction. Autobiography, as a search for identity, is a search for a moving target. The life and the thought are produced in the writing.

Edgerton traces various critical perspectives on autobiography. Possibility of collectivity in autobiography. She contends that much African-American autobiography has been directed at a project of antiracism. By writing the self into existence, writing an entire people along with it. It is only in our relations to others that identity, and thus autobiography, has meaning.

Autobiography in Fiction
Truth can be read in a text in ways unrelated to factual accuracy, particularly in terms of style or form. "The advantage of fiction writing over autobiography is that the writer can claim a greater distance, and the desire for ignorance is more readily exposed." If autobiography isn't truth, is it impossible and therefore useless? Is there a self to even write of if the self is in a constant state of flux? Can text even hint at the real person behind it?

Her method of autobiography involves the interreferential reading of autobiography, fiction and historical fiction set near her home or region, accompanied by reflectiver writing into self and other. Other is critical to sense of place.

Making the familiar strange by abandoning stereotypes and examining one's cliches. Teachers should work for their own, as well for students' self-awareness. Autobiography is not necessarily life story, but any style and approach to expressing /creating/learning about ourselves.

She goes on to discuss her choice of autobiographical text, the "Plantation" trilogy by Gwin Bristow, graphic in its depiction of life for poor whites in Louisiana, first published in 1939. Some comparisons to Gone With the Wind and Beloved in terms of the sense of place, poverty, and race.

She writes of the appeal of these Southern romance novels for women, and Bristow's novel for her in particular...memory and "rememory" (remembrance of collective events and thoughts). Mythical characters, like "Southern Belle" and legends rather than factual history.

Cruelty of southern plantation owners towards poor yet kindness and gentility at home, as if their place of dominance is natural or ordained. Bristow write from perspective of poor whites because supposedly most everything else is from p.o.v. of rich whites or slaves.

The novel doesn't challenge "the ahistoricism of Southern romance." But the value of rereading and rewriting about it is the suggestion of place (historically, psychologically, geographically) through which we can examine our relations to others, to self, to place.

Autobiography as cultural studies produces new relations and orientations to culture, promotes cross-cultural imagination or literacy of the imagination.

Student Autobiographies
She describes the autobiography unit she taught, its difficulties and importance for students. She describes several student autobiographies about reading and writing. The first presents a "surprise of otherness" and the possibilities for departures from culturl "scripts."

Conclusion
Self-reflective writing calls for a reconceptualization of multicultural teacher education and curriculum involving historical and current development of culyural studies and the politics of identity. Literary and autobiographical studies are interdisciplinary and intertextual. Cultural studies is a liberal arts discipline.