ABSTRACT
What we have been calling betweener autoethnography comes from a long tradition of self-reflexive writing that explores personal experiences and how these experiences connect autobiography to history (Denzin, 1997), how personal individual experiences connect with wider cultural, political, and social understandings (Ellis, 2004). Before it was called autoethnography, however, the central importance of connecting the personal to the political had been very clear to those enslaved and otherwise conquered, colonized, and historically dehumanized. As literacy itself was withheld from the oppressed until recent years in human history, we have known of this critical form of personal narrative only from oral traditions, folklore, and various arts. We think that Frederick Douglass, for instance, through his three autobiographical narratives (Douglass, 1845, 1855, 1881), was an earlier writer of personal narratives used directly to critique, trouble, resist, and challenge systems of oppression, while also making a call to liberation, freedom, emancipation, and, ultimately, reconciliation and social healing. We intend the same with our own betweener autoethnographies in the early part of the 21st century, with our own contemporary critical personal narratives about oppressive Us versus Themisms, with a call for unconditional inclusion of the Other in a utopian circle of Us. As we try to imagine and constantly revive notions of utopia and paths to a kinder and more just world for more people, we have gone back in time to find renewed inspiration in these earlier critical storytellers.
