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Performing Auto/biography: Narrating a Life as Activism analyzes the rhetorical strategies employed in five authors' auto/biographical texts, examining their representations of identities and the public implications of writing individual identity. Exploring the ways race, class, culture, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality might affect the form(s) in which writers choose to write (e.g., memoir, fictional autobiography, poetry), questions how autobiographers challenge notions of genre, truth, and representation. This builds on the argument that constructing identity is a Performing Autobiography performance, one that can simultaneously use and subvert traditional notions of rhetoric and genre. By examining the auto/biographical texts of Zora Neale Hurston, Audre Lorde, Dorothy Allison, Joyce Johnson, and Shirley Geok-lin Lim together, the book theorizes self-representation and genres as rhetorical performances, and therefore their texts can be seen as "performative auto/biography"-transgressive archives where readers are asked to consider their own identities and act accordingly. In doing so, this book contributes to growing theories in feminist rhetorics and auto/biography studies, arguing that these performative genres advocate for life narratives as political and social activism.
List of contents
Chapter 1: Introduction: Intersections of Genre, Gender, Performance, and Rhetoric.- Chapter 2: Theorizing Rhetorics of Identity to Create Rhetorical Performativity as an Analytic.- Chapter 3: Zora Neale Hurston's Craft and a Griot's Refusal to Conform.- Chapter 4: Audre Lorde's Intellectual Body: Scripting an Embodied Activism.- Chapter 5: Self-Representation, Genre, and Performativity: Dorothy Allison's Performances Across Genres.- Chapter 6: Joyce Johnson's Alternative Beat Narrative: Women Outside the Fram.- Chapter 7: Shirley Geok-lin Lim's Embodied Memories: Academic Autobiography, Genre, and Mentorship.- Chapter 8: Performative Auto/biography as Transgressive Archives.
About the author
Katrina M. Powell is Professor of Rhetoric and Writing and Founding Director of the Center for Refugee, Migrant, and Displacement Studies at Virginia Tech, USA. She is the author of
The Anguish of Displacement: The Politics of Literacy in the Letters of Mountain Families in Shenandoah National Park (2007) and
Identity and Power in Narratives of Displacement (2015).
