Autobiography as a Politics of Metissage: A Pedagogy of Encounter
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Mark Zuss is Assistant Professor in the Graduate Reading Program, Lehman College, City University of New York. His research interests include inquiries into the relation between culture, cognition and the formation of subjectivity in literacy contexts. His research has included investigation of the development of children’s awareness of audience and genre in letter writing, and revision strategies concerned with depictions of race, class and gender in writing across the curriculum and remediation contexts. His most recent research has focused on the uses of dialogic narrative structures in students’life writings, including autobiographies, biographies, memoirs and journals.
Notes
1. Louis Smith, “Biographical Method,” Handbook of Qualitative Research, ed. Norman Denzin, Yvonna Lincoln (Sage, 1994), 288. Michael Beaujour, Miroirs d’encre, (Paris: Seuil, 1980). Beuajour distinquishes autobiography and self-portraits, defining self-portraits as “texts which are self-contained rather than being the representation of past actions,” 348
2. The term is from Francoise Lionnet, Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture, (Cornell University Press, 1989), 99. Lionnet uses the term with regard to her analysis of Zora Neal Hurston. See also Mary Louise Pratt’s use of the term in her discussion of ‘contact zones’ in her Imperial Eyes, travel writing and transculturation, (Routledge, 1992).
3. In D. Jean Clandinin, F. Michael Connelly, “Personal Experience Methods,” Handbook of Qualitative Research, Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln (Eds.), (Sage, 1994), 421. Molloy also takes a constructivist position with regard to autobiographical writing as a “re-presentation, that is, a retelling, since the life to which it supposedly refers is already a kind of narrative construct. Life is always, necessarily, a tale.” S. Molloy, At Face Value: Autobiographical Writing in Spanish America, (Cambridge University Press, 1991), 5.
4. Cameron McCarthy, Race and Curriculum; Social inequality and the theories and politics of difference in contemporary research on schooling (Falmer Press, 1990).
4. Emily Hicks, “Cultural Marxism: Non-Synchrony and Feminist Practice,” in Linda Sargent (Ed.) Women and Revolution, (Boston: South End Press, 1981), pp. 219–238. Hicks’s germinal statement of non-synchrony was founded on a critique of parallelist positions’ symmetry and reciprocal analyses. Hicks’ perceived these as too macrolevel and abstract to explain complex and systematic contradictions at the institutional level. In this view, daily practices and ideological commitments are contradictory and nonsynchronous, varying between subjects who purportedly share some affinity as raced, classed and gendered subjects.
5. Michael Apple, Lois Weis (Eds.), Ideology and Practice in Schooling, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press. See also Cameron McCarthy and Michael Apple, “Race, Class and Gender in American Educational Research: Toward a Nonsynchronous Parallelist Position” in Class, Race and Gender in American Education, ed. Lois Weis (Albany: State University of New York, 1988), 9–39.
6. Betty Bergland, “Postmodernism and the Autobiographical Subject: Reconstructing the Other,” p. 161.
7. Louis Renza, “The Veto of the Imagination: a Theory of Autobiography” In J. Olney (Ed.), Autobiography: Essays theoretical and critical, (Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 274.
8. Francoise Lionnet, Autobiographical Voices; Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture, (Cornell University Press, 1989).
9. Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, (University Press of Virginia, 1989).
10. M. Detienne and J. P. Vernant Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society (University of Chicago Press, 1978) explicate the centrality of metis in ancient Greek thought and culture. Their work delineates the multiple meanings of metis as a guiding principle of practical thinking. Their largely philological inquiry also focuses closely on the primacy of metis in themes and mythic character, as well as its serving as a developmental paradigm in the ‘skillful’ and ‘cunning intelligence’ in the practices of hunting, fishing, athletics and various other forms of craft.
11. Emmanuel Levinas, “Wholly Otherwise”, in Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley (Eds.), Re-Reading Levinas (Indiana University Press, 1991).
12. Trinh T. Minh-ha, “Introduction,” Discourse 8 (Fall/Winter 1986/7), p. 7.
13. Gilles Deleuze and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, (University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
14. Shirley Neuman, “An appearance walking in a forest the sexes burn”: Autobiography and the Construction of the Feminine Body. In K. Ashley, L. Gilmore, and G. Peters (Eds.), Autobiography and Postmodernism, (Amherst: University of Massachusetts...
