Narrating the American West: New Forms of Historical Memory By Jo ...

New Western writers alternately reproduce, challenge, and rewrite colonial representations through particular narrative strategies. In their concern with constructions of selfhood, these writers both draw upon and turn away from autobiographical conventions to rewrite western historical narratives more broadly.

Autobiographical Conventions in New Western Narrative

New Western narratives that draw upon autobiographical conventions evoke multiple and contradictory notions of selfhood. Memoirs that celebrate individualism and regeneration in open space contribute to the work of the Turner thesis and formula Westerns. Yet while conventional colonial histories and memoirs validate the regeneration of an autonomous subject in an “open” landscape, certain autobiographical narratives by ethnic and women writers challenge (and in some cases reinforce) these representations by asserting alternative forms of autobiographical selfhood.¹²

While its association with autonomous, masculinist individualism renders traditional autobiographical selfhood inherently exclusionary, autobiography’s link with history, through its “commitment to the actual” (Fischer 198), provides an opportunity for marginalized subjects to reclaim a voice by articulating their versions of selfhood in a historical context.¹³ When writers expand the forms through which these life stories are told, new opportunities emerge for rewriting exclusionary versions of American and western selfhood. Indeed, the very act of writing an autobiography asserts the value of identities often denied to colonized peoples. Writers from colonized communities engage in a dialogue about the nature of American and western identity by challenging their exclusion from these categories. At the same time, however, some writers also contest the narrative forms that traditionally represent nationalistic versions of identity. Thus, while colonized writers who turn to self-life writing participate in an autobiographical discourse from which they have historically been excluded, they simultaneously challenge and revise the very forms that define this discourse.