A substantial collection on autobiography as a political form.

An autobiography here is not simply the record of a pre-existing self, but one of the places where gender, race, colonial history, sexuality and national identity are actively made and contested. Smith and Watson bring together essays on women’s life-writing that refuse the fantasy of autobiography as transparent self-expression. The “subject” here is always produced inside language, institutions, inheritance and power.

With enormous breadth, it moves between feminist theory, postcolonial critique, ethnic and racial identity, and specific autobiographical traditions, including work on Indigenous identity, African American women’s writing, and the problem of speaking from positions historically treated as marginal or derivative. The book belongs to that early-1990s moment when feminist criticism was rigorously dismantling the supposedly universal subject and asking who had ever been allowed to count as one in the first place.

Dense in places, but extremely fertile: for readers interested in memoir, autofiction, feminist theory, postcolonial studies, identity, life-writing and the politics of who gets to say “I.”

University of Minnesota Press, 1992. Paperback. Edited by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. Light shelf wear and minor edge rubbing; clean internally, binding sound. Very good used condition.