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Women's Life Writing and Diaspora

This is the second in a double special issue of Life Writing dedicated to Women’s Life Writing and Diaspora. The double special issue seeks to interrogate what happens to the auto/biographical text under the pressure of the condition of diaspora, and specifically, when the woman writer is subject to this pressure. Paul De Man opened up questions as to the undecidability of life-writing, the impossibility of demarcating auto/biography from fiction, and this concern persists in the auto/biographical texts under analysis in this issue. Going further, though, contributors demonstrate that the distinction between auto/biography and other forms of representation is equally blurred: the texts discussed here might also be described as theory, or autoethnography, or oral history; this is testament to the vibrancy and the vigour of contemporary women’s life writing in the context of diaspora. In ‘Autoethnography, Transculturation, and the Metrics of Authenticity in Ethnicity Debates: the Case of When I Was Puerto Rican’, leading scholar in the field of women’s autobiography studies, Julia Watson, explores autoethnography through the concept of a ‘metrics of authenticity’ that works to authenticate the narrator’s authority over the culture she represents. Watson explains that these metrics include such strategies as embedding her narrative with authoritative voices from her cultural tradition, and being able to describe how it feels to eat a Puerto Rican guava in a way that marks the fruit as distinct from any available in New York, thus demonstrating the narrator’s experience of the culture she describes. This article shares the preoccupation with geographical crossings and spaces that was a prevalent theme for contributors to the first of this double special issue. The powerful autoethnographic voice of Esmeralda Santiago’s When I Was Puerto Rican alters when the narrative moves from Puerto Rico to the diaspora location, Brooklyn. The effect of this geographical crossing is to force together two competing narratives, and the self-aware Puerto Rican individual cannot match the force of the collective mythology of the immigrant experience Life Writing, 2013 Vol. 10, No. 2, 125 128, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2013.766376