For many emergent ethnic writers, both “American history” and ethnohistory are things that they learn in school; ethnic self-history is what they learn at home or in the streets of their neighborhoods. Paula Gunn Allen contrasts the education that she received in school (where she was “treated to bloody tales” of “savage Indians” killing “hapless priests and missionaries” and taught “that Indians were people who had benefited mightily from the advanced knowledge and superior morality of the Anglo-Europeans”) with the understanding “derived” from her “daily experience of Indian life” and from the teachings of her “mother and the other Indian people who raised” her.46 The narrator of Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone (1993) reflects, “We know so little of the old country. We repeat the names of grandfathers and uncles, but they have always been strangers to us. Family exists only because somebody has a story, and knowing the story connects us to a history.”47 Ethnic self-history, in other words, is intimately connected to personal narrative, and as a result, autobiography and autobiographical fiction have played a formative role in U.S. emergent literatures.48
Some ethnic autobiographies, like Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory, Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter (1945), or Monica Sone’s Nisei Daughter (1953), devote themselves to charting a process of assimilation into the mainstream of American life. They adopt the individualistic perspective traditionally associated with the Western tradition of autobiography that dates back at least to Rousseau’s Confessions (1782, and possibly to Augustine’s from the fourth century CE), charting individual development as a process of conversion that leads to a sense of self-autonomy. They belong in a history of American emergent literatures because, despite their assimilative stances, they dramatize and document the damage inflicted upon minority cultures in the United States by the mainstream. In contrast, autobiographies like The Woman Warrior, Ernesto Galarza’s Barrio Boy (1971), or America Is in the Heart (1946) by the Filipino immigrant Carlos Bulosan describe development in collective rather than individualistic terms; they set themselves against the grain of Western autobiography. Although Bulosan concludes his text with what seems to be a ringing affirmation of the American dream, expressing his “desire to know America, and to become a part of her great tradition, and to contribute something toward her final fulfillment,” his conception of that “fulfillment” has little to do with the laissez-faire individualism typically associated with the American Dream. What Bulosan seeks is “the enlargement of the American Dream,”49 and what his autobiography charts is the development of feelings of communal solidarity. Late in the autobiography, Bulosan recalls attending a meeting in Los Angeles with “several cannery workers: Japanese, Mexicans, Filipinos, and white Americans” and coming to the realization that “there was the same thing in each of them that possessed me: their common faith in the working man…. Then it came to me that we are all fighting against one enemy: Fascism. It was in every word and gesture, every thought.”50 Indeed, the image that brings about Bulosan’s final reverie upon the promise of America is the sight of “Filipino pea pickers in the fields” stopping to wave as the bus that Bulosan is riding passes by.
The history of Native American autobiography sets these two forms in a developmental relation, while re-enacting the shift from ethnography to ethnic self-history. The first full-length autobiography published by a Native American, William Apess’s A Son of the Forest. The Experience of William Apes, a Native of the Forest (1829), is quite literally a conversion narrative that concludes with Apess’s receiving a license to preach.51 George Copway, a Canadian Ojibwa who moved to the United States in 1846 after becoming a Methodist minister, mixes ethnography with conversion narrative in The Life, History, and Travels of Ka-gega-gah-bowh (1847), which contains detailed, if slightly romanticized, accounts of Ojibwa tribal customs as well as the story of Copway’s conversion to Christianity. Charles Eastman’s two autobiographies, Indian Boyhood (1902) and From the Deep Woods to Civilization (1916), stress the formative influence not of the Santee Sioux customs according to which he was raised by his paternal grandmother and uncle, but rather the Christian humanism that he learned at U.S. universities.
Apess, Copway, and Eastman are exceptions rather than the rule for nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Native American autobiography. They write rather than speak their autobiographies. The bulk of nineteenth-century Native American personal narratives were transcriptions of oral accounts, and they were presented to the white reading public as specimens of ethnography. Prominent examples include J. B. Patterson’s Life of Black Hawk (1833), S. M. Barrett’s Geronimo’s Story of His Life (1906), and perhaps the most famous of these accounts, Black Elk Speaks, Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux, as told through John G. Neihardt (1932). Although scholars believe that Neihardt sought to capture the Lakota chief’s narrative as faithfully as he could, he nevertheless took liberties with the oral account, including the addition of the text’s famous opening and closing paragraphs. Instead of Neihardt serving as Black Elk’s amanuensis, we have Black Elk serving as the vehicle for Neihardt’s vision of Native America. In contrast to these personal narratives, in which both the individuality and the representativeness of the subject are effaced by the mediation of a white interpreter, late-twentieth-century autobiographical texts like N. Scott Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969) and The Names (1976) and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Storyteller (1981) begin with the individual voices of their authors, but quickly expand to incorporate the polyvocality of tribal traditions.
Autobiography and autobiographical fiction have also played a formative role in the emergence of gay and lesbian American literature. With the advent of the gay liberation movement in the aftermath of the Stonewall Rebellion came a new literary genre: the “coming-out” narrative. Anthologies of personal accounts like The Lesbian Path (1980) and The Coming Out Stories (1980) found an immediate audience within the gay community, while Audre Lorde’s “biomythography,” Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982), and Paul Monette’s Becoming a Man (1992) gained national critical attention. The early 1980s saw the rise of what might be called the gay male Bildungsroman, whose central act was often a boy’s coming out to his parents. Prominent examples of the genre include Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story (1980) and Robert Ferro’s The Family of Max Desir (1983), as well as David Leavitt’s The Lost Language of Cranes (1986), in which a son and father come out to one another. Like many ethnic autobiographies, coming-out narratives map the individual onto the collective: they tell individual and occasionally idiosyncratic stories that often turn on the realization that the narrator’s experience is shared by a broad community of other individuals. The act of coming out is often performative rather than constitutive; that is, the act of coming out to one’s family and friends is often the very act that signals and brings about the embracing of one’s homosexual identity. Likewise, the emergence of the coming-out narrative as a major genre of writing has helped to bring about the existence of an openly gay American literature and to provide crucial encouragement to gay Americans still locked in their closets. The fact that literary coming-out narratives may have practical effects is made evident at the end of the anthology Growing Up Gay/Growing Up Lesbian (1994), which includes one appendix listing “books, magazines, and videos that may be of special interest to young adults” and a second appendix listing such “resources” as hotlines and support groups for gay youth. The collective nature of gay personal narrative and autobiographical fiction has only been strengthened with the advent of a second major genre, the AIDS narrative, which includes both non-fictional accounts such as