ABSTRACT
Autobiographical texts themselves might be understood as assemblages of diverse identity ascriptions, claims, and relationships. Particular acts might be understood as nodes in a larger network of aesthetic, social, material, affective, and political currents, all intersecting one another, all productive of, and disruptive of, identities and their social meanings. In this chapter, the author writes essay that there are productive ways of approaching the dynamic complexities of autobiographical inscription through assemblage theory. Issues of identity are commonly understood as motivators of life-writing projects, whatever generic form they take—autoethnography, trauma narrative, lyric poem, traditional bildungsroman, testimonio, to name only a few of the many genres of the autobiographical. Assemblage theory thus offers a provocative way of approaching complexities of identity by extending the integuments of identity formation beyond agency of a singular human being. The author want to pick up here the term “assemblage” and use this occasion to deploy assemblage theory to think alongside concepts of autobiographical inscription and identity.
