Reflective Narrative Autoethnography

Reflective Narrative: Autoethnography and the Discourse of the Self

Anusha A J

MPhil Scholar, Department of English,University of Kerala

Abstract: While much has been talked and discussed about the validity, reliability and the perceptibility of the writings that convey the conditions and epiphanic moments of life, the fascination with the life narratives has been increasing day by day. As the postcolonial era has brought the minority literature a very critical juncture to explored, it becomes important to understand variant platforms that articulate the lives of the self and the other. Bringing in an interdisciplinary mode to discourses and genres are the formation of new literatures that make way for new analyses and new meanings or perspectives.

This is primarily a process of elimination: once you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogma, the truths that are not your own but other people 's, the mottos, the slogans, the out-and-out lies of your nation, the myths of your historical moment - once you have removed all that warps experience into a shape you do not recognize and do not believe in - what you are left with is something approximating the truth of your own conception. (Smith 64)

Culture, society and identity are three inextricably linked fluid constructs that have been for years extrapolated in relevant discourses. Culture is an assemblage of meanings, whether continuous, discontinuous, junctive or overlapping, the production of which is attributed to a social group or that particular society. The Self is entrenched in these meanings and constantly trying to cope up with the flux it encounters - political, social, cultural, and economic: all repeatedly affecting the

While the hyphenated usage of the term: “auto-ethnography” by anthropologist Karl Heider in 1975 charts the initiation of the later autoethnography, the signification of the term ‘auto/self’ then is not one of the ethnographer but rather the informant. The term then underwent a number of subsequent significations and the signifier itself took on various forms until critical scholarship in the last decade of the twentieth century persisted using ‘autoethnography’ .Today, the term has still got its set of meanings and explanations attributed to it both from the anthropological and a literary narration of history. Foremost of the definitions of the generic label in anthropology has been summed up by Deborah Reed-Danahay in the seminal work Auto/Ethnography: Rewriting the Self and the