Description
Book SynopsisSelves in Dialogue: A Transethnic Approach to American Life Writing constitutes an explicit answer to the urgent call for a comparative study of American autobiography. This collection of essays ostensibly intends to cut across cultural, “racial” and/or “ethnic” boundaries, introducing the concept of “transethnicity” and arguing for its increasing validity in the ever-changing field of American Studies. Accordingly, the comparative analysis in Selves in Dialogue is implemented not by juxtaposing essays that pay “separate but equal” attention to specific “monoethnic” or “monocultural” traditions—as has been the usual strategy in book-length publications of this sort—, but by critically engaging with two or more different traditions in every single essay. Mixing rather than segregating. The transethnic approach proposed in this collection does not imply erasing the very difference and diversity that makes American autobiographies all the more thrilling to read and study. Group-specific research of an “intra-ethnic” nature should and will continue to thrive. And yet, the field of American Studies is now ready to indulge more freely, and more knowledgeably, in transethnic explorations of life writing, in an attempt to delineate both the divergences and the similarities between the different autobiographies written in the US. Because of its unusual perspective, Selves in Dialogue can be of interest not only for specialists in life writing, but also for those working in the larger fields of American Literature, Ethnic Studies or American Studies.
Table of ContentsBegoña Simal: Selves in Dialogue: An Introduction Jeffrey Gray: Identity Cards: Autobiography and Critical Practice Ana Mª Manzanas: Self and Nation in Franklin’s Autobiography and Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior Rachel Ihara and Jaime Cleland: Ethnic Authorship and the Autobiographical Act: Zitkala-Ša, Sui Sin Far, and the Crafting of Authorial Identity Brenda R. Smith: “We, Too, Sing America”: The Construction of American Subjectivity in African American Migration and European Immigrant Autobiographies Anna M. Brígido-Corachán: Native Journeys of Self-Figuration: N. Scott Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain and Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands / La Frontera José Liste Noya: Memory in Motion: The “Double Narratives” of Paul Auster’s The Invention of Solitude and Samuel R. Delany’s The Motion of Light in Water David Río: Autobiographical Writing on Politics in the Sin State: Latina and Basque American Perspectives Aitor Ibarrola-Armendáriz: Puerto Rican and Dominican Self-Portraits and their Frames: The “Autobiographical” Fiction of Esmeralda Santiago, Junot Díaz, and Julia Álvarez Paula Torreiro Pazo: Living in the Taste of Things: Food, Self and Family in Diana Abu-Jaber’s The Language of Baklava and Leslie Li’s Daughter of Heaven Bibliography Contributors Index
