ABSTRACT
Ethnic autobiography, like ethnicity itself, flourishes under the watchful eye of the dominant culture; both are caught in the dual processes of commodification and surveillance (see previous chapter).1 This might help explain why the work of writers who come from, or are perceived as coming from, ethnic minority backgrounds continues to be marketed so resolutely for a mainstream reading public as ‘autobiographical’. Granted, many of these writers have experimented with one form or other of autobiography-a literary genre which, while less flexible than some, undoubtedly provides a range of useful models for the recuperative articulation of lived experience. Still, as Susan Hawthorne among others has argued, even when such writers-particularly women writers-have produced other literary forms, especially novels, ‘their attempts to universalise their experience [have tended all too often to be] reduced to the particularities of a lived life’ (Hawthorne 1989:262). Why should this be so? One reason, Hawthorne suggests, is that there is a mainstream demand for ethnic (minority) autobiography that is ‘precipitated [in part] by voyeurism on the part of the dominant culture’ (Hawthorne 1989:263). Ethnic autobiographies, in this context, signal the possibility of indirect access to ‘exotic’ cultures whose differences are acknowledged and celebrated even as they are rendered amenable to a mainstream reading public. As Hawthorne suggests, ethnic autobiographies might be construed as less imaginatively rich than other, more canonical works of Western literature; for while ‘[t]he particularities of the dominant culture are [often] taken to be universal by those who transmit the canon to lay readers…the particularities of the non-dominant culture are [usually] taken to be simply that: particularities’ (Hawthorne 1989:263). Notwithstanding, there are compensations: for one, the ‘ethnographic’ translation of personal experience into a composite metonymy for a range
of cultural practices invested with an authenticity that the dominant culture either professes to lack or that it claims to have lost, and for which it feels a mute nostalgia. Under these conditions, ethnic autobiography provides the basis for a redemptive exploration of a putatively threatened cultural authenticity-an authenticity, however, not so much recuperated as retranslated to meet the dominant culture’s needs.2
