ABSTRACT
Is there something ethically problematic about fictionalizing an actual person’s life? There certainly can be, and the experimental writer John Edgar Wideman provides readers with useful ways of identifying ethical versus unethical biofictions in his short story “Nat Turner Confesses.” Biofictions are unethical when they (1) use a life solely for material gain and power, (2) strategically empower certain people and disadvantage others, and (3) disable the reader’s critical-creative capacity through simplistic and reductive representations of the biographical subject. Biofiction can be ethical when they activate the critical-creative capacity and empower the marginalized and the oppressed.
