Performing Autobiography

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.

‘Scholars interested in auto/biography studies will find this absorbing analysis of the life narratives of five 20th century women authors a ground-breaking mustread. Professor Powell uncovers an archive of untold stories of writers engaging in performative acts of “decreation,” that is, dismantling hegemonic identities and power structures in order to redefine themselves in unexpected language, forms, and locations. Her subjects explore unrecognized expressions of social activism and call on other women to do the same.’

- Hildy Miller, Professor of English, Portland State University, USA

'Through her analysis of the varied work of five women writers, Katrina Powell highlights the interactive and performative nature of life writing, reading, representation, and mentorship—and illuminates the ways autobiography can create social change. Her interdisciplinary approach encourages readers to reconsider the boundaries thatseparate not only genres and disciplines but also individuals and groups. Performing Autobiography asks readers to expand their understanding of what counts as autobiography, archives, and activism.'

- Melissa A. Goldthwaite, Professor of English at Saint Joseph's University, USA

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).