“Contiguous But Widely Separated” Selves: Im/Migrant Life Narrative as Data-Driven Form

This essay proposes that an epistemological commitment to data collection creates a distinct aesthetic in life narratives, and argues that an abundance of data creates a sense of multiple, co-present identities within a given subject. Focusing on The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans, a collection of “lifelets” edited by Hamilton Holt (1906), Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives (1909), and The Soul of an Immigrant (1921), the autobiography of Constantine Panunzio, Rodrigues shows how the identities that these subjects iterate are in flux, and thus the subjects are constantly in transit among their identities.