In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

71 I n Shani Mootoo’s latest novel, He Drown She in the Sea, the similarities between the author’s and the protagonist’s social identities—both are Indo-Caribbean immigrants to Canada—and the realistic detail with which the racial and class tensions in both of these places are portrayed suggest that the novel might offer readers outside this cultural context access to a privileged, “insider” perspective: the connection between the personal and the cultural that is promised by autoethnography. However, while Mootoo’s novel does reflect the racialized context out of which she writes, it also resists the manner in which the autoethnographic paradigm configures its three constitutive elements: the self (auto), culture (ethno), and the connection between them that is asserted through writing (graphy). Specifically, the novel complicates the presumed link between writer and culture that often underlies readings of minority texts, thereby challenging the assumption that ethnic writers are representative of their cultures and impeding the means by which ethnic writing is often classified and interpreted. Autoethnography—a term now widely used in reference to literature as well as social science—is perhaps best understood as a reaction to traditional ethnography. Its practice is based in what Arthur Bochner calls “the narrative turn” in the human sciences and the recognition that “we are inside what we are studying [and the] reflexive qualities of human communication should not be bracketed ‘in the name of science.’”1 In turning to narrative “as a mode of inquiry,”2 autoethnographers seek to forfeit traditional ethnography’s claim to objectivity—what Carolyn Ellis refers to as the tendency to present accounts of other cultures “as if they were [chapter three] Tides of Belonging Reconfiguring the Autoethnographic Paradigm in Shani Mootoo’s He Drown She in the Sea Kristina Kyser written from nowhere by nobody.”3 This foregrounding of subjectivity is motivated partly by an ongoing quest to locate the authentic insider perspectives of silenced peoples for whom traditional ethnographers presumed to speak. The primary characteristic of autoethnography is the connection it asserts between the personal and the cultural, and autoethnographic texts often “attempt to demonstrate the lived experience and humanity of authors and their people to outside audiences.”4 Although it has some obvious advantages over traditional ethnography , there are a number of problems with the autoethnographic paradigm . Despite wariness among cultural theorists about concepts of “pure” or “authentic” culture, autoethnography still depends on a related form of essentialist thinking. As James Buzard notes in his article “On AutoEthnographic Authority,” “perceiving the transcultural or hybrid nature of a text does not protect us from concepts like authenticity: in order to label the text correctly (as autoethnography), we must know that the author of the text really was a member of a [particular] group.”5 To label a work autoethnography is also to foreground its genesis in the author’s culture at the expense of other relevant aspects of his or her subjectivity. This approach is akin to what Paul Gilroy refers to as “cultural insiderism,” and it involves “an absolute sense of ethnic difference” maximized to the point that it “acquires an incontestable priority” over all other aspects of social and historical experience and identities.6 Problematic assumptions about the authenticity and priority of ethnic identity are compounded by the fact that, as Buzard points out, “our established metaphors for conceptualizing cultures and the authoritative or responsible manner of relating oneself to them—mainly those of place and movement—have become quite mixed up.”7 For example, authoritative knowledge of a culture had to be proven (in however flawed a manner) by ethnographers, while it is assumed in the case of autoethnographers. This is partly because autoethnography has retained the use of problematic spatial metaphors that are conducive to essentialism: the use of the insider-outsider binary, for example, often implies that “one common culture lies across every inch of a people’s land like an evenly applied coat of paint” and that every “insider” enjoys equal access to it and is capable of enunciating it.8 According to Buzard, even recent ethnological approaches that emphasize the mobility of their subjects —such as James Clifford’s Routes—depend on the equally problematic conceptions of “culture-as-steamer-trunk” or of an ethnographic Table of Elements: namely, culture as a portable unit that is still capable of containing those who are its “insiders,” and that remains undissolved in mixture to the point that an infinite number of combinations are possible.9 All...

Share