|
AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND NATIONAL IDENTITY in the Americas
puts texts from English and French Canada, Guatemala,
Nicaragua, Brazil, Bolivia, and the United States into a
hemispheric dialogue on national and ethnic identity.
Drawing on such materials as journals, personal essays,
autobiography, and the testimonio, this ambitious book is as
comprehensive in its treatment of autobiographical writing
as in its geographical coverage.
Departing from Benedict Anderson's hopeful premise that
the "imagined community" is fundamentally inclusive, Steven
V. Hunsaker maintains that national identity is more
idiosyncratic, complex, and divisive than Anderson's model
suggests. The fact that potential compatriots create the
nation by seeing themselves as a community means that there
can be no guarantee of uniformly imagined identity. Hunsaker
uses works by such authors as Rigoberta Menchú,
Carolina Maria de Jesus, Pierre Vallières, Maxine
Hong Kingston, and Richard Rodriguez to illustrate how
different populations within a single nation--children,
women, indigenous groups, and minority groups--challenge
established collective identities and create their own
senses of community.
Bringing into play elements of genre studies and regional
studies, the book illustrates the liberating potential of
seeing a nation as the product of its citizens, but also the
instability inherent in national communities imagined across
race, class, ethnicity, and gender.
|
|
|
"This book makes a significant contribution to
autobiographical writing in the Americas. It presents
carefully and methodically the human drama of identity as a
difficult and telling negotiation. Hunsaker has chosen many
well-known books, as well as some lesser-known ones,
bringing them all into a discussion of common themes and
problems that include language, nationalism, gender, and
migration."--Román de la Campa, Stony Brook
University, State University of New York
|
