![]() ![]() Clearly, Obama’s autobiography, as the very title itself suggests, refers to the self who is perpetually changing and always evolving. ![]() As such, Obama’s autobiography can be understood as fusing her personal story with her public story. Michelle Obama, a former First Lady of the United States of America, approaches the act of autobiographical writing by embedding the self in personal relationships to her family and friends as well as in public political events. In this thesis I will examine the autobiography of an African American woman from the twenty-first century: Michelle Obama’s Becoming. 3 The tradition by African American women autobiographers is, as Francoise Lionnet claims in her book Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, SelfPortraiture, ‘To read a narrative that depicts the journey of a female self striving to become the subject of her won discourse, the narrator of her own story, is to witness the unfolding of an autobiographical subject’. ![]() Scholar Carole Boyce Davies argues that ‘the African woman’s autobiography, as African autobiography and as woman’s autobiography has to be read against the theoretical discussions specific to these two’. 2 Thus, the tradition of African American women’s autobiographies requires a suitable theoretical framework when examining their texts. In her autobiography Becoming, Michelle Obama shows her awareness of her intersectional identity as she writes ‘I’ve been the only woman, the only African American, in all sorts of rooms’. This statement from the 20th century captures the intersectionality of African American women’s identities. ![]() 1Īfrican American women autobiographers constructs a self that has, as Terrell puts it, two central handicaps-gender and race. I belong to the only group in this country, which has two such huge obstacles to surmount. A white woman has only one handicap to overcome-that of sex. It cannot possibly be like a story written by a white woman. In 1940, Mary Church Terrell wrote in the introduction of her autobiography, A Colored Woman Living In A White World: This is the story of a colored woman living in a white world. Introduction: Tracing Autobiographical Genres and Intersectional IdentitiesĬhapter One: ‘Am I Good Enough?’: Selling the American Dream in Michelle Obama’s Autobiography BecomingĬhapter Two: Reinventing The Role of First Lady: A Quest for Self-Definition Through Intersectionalityīibliography Introduction Fusing Autobiographical Genres and Intersectional Identities ![]()
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