ABSTRACT
Identity, as Stuart Hall asserts, is shaped at the “unstable point where the ‘unspeakable’ stories of subjectivity meet the narratives of history, of a culture.”1 This book examines how identity emerges through fierce contestation over narratives of human being, in sites that most graphically demonstrate the excruciating tension between seemingly intimate and individual stories about subjectivity and apparently more distanced narratives of collective history. You will find here the argument that narratives of origin, place, and even agency contain unruly, excessive meanings that speak pointedly of the moments of socio/political trauma, the facts of death, that mark the fleshy reality of American history. Out of this interface, stories of self unfold, like scars, as bumps and grooves in the terrain of subject formation, recording in often displaced, oblique, and disavowed ways our attempts to re-imagine ourselves as agents in history.
