Abstract
Practices of ‘citizenship’ are always situated in place. The genre of life writing prominently illustrates the narrative construction of individual agency and the subject as a rights’ bearer; at the same time, it highlights the social processes and structures that may prevent the individual from becoming an agent and thus questions notions of citizenship that rest on assumptions about a presumably autonomous subjectivity. The readings in this chapter show how Maria Campbell’s Halfbreed (1982 [1973]), Cheryl Foggo’s Pourin’ Down Rain (1990), and Fred Wah’s Diamond Grill (1997), each by very different textual and paratextual means, inscribe minoritized subjects and communities into hegemonic spaces of membership and belonging. By doing so, the texts explore the historical and ideological embeddedness of the autobiographical subject, her/his possibilities of citizenship, and the centrality of a relational understanding of self for agency and cultural co-authorship.
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- 1.
Krupat has used this distinction to argue that ‘autobiography’ is a Western genre built on a liberal notion of the autonomous self and as such has no equivalent in Indigenous tradition (1985, p. 29). I concur with the critique of his position as formulated by Deanna Reder, that such a position is not merely descriptive but prescriptive and that it ‘naturalizes stereotypical binaries’ (2010, p. 156). It does so only, however, when the autobiographical utterance is regarded as a self-expression unmarked by culturally established narrative conventions.
- 2.
I would like to thank Karina Vernon for allowing me to cite from her dissertation manuscript ‘The Black Prairies: History, Subjectivity, Writing’ (University of Victoria 2008).
- 3.
For a discussion of the link of Wah’s politics of the local and his poetics, see Saul (2008, in particular pp. 145–46).
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Sarkowsky, K. (2018). Writing Lives: Cartographies of Citizenship and Belonging. In: Narrating Citizenship and Belonging in Anglophone Canadian Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96935-0_4
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