Auto-Ethnography as Literary Critique

Abstract

n Du Bois’s Telegram: Literary Resistance and State Containment, Juliana Spahr asserts multiple times that the book should not be read as a scholarly monograph, pur et dur, but as “an autobiography about how my education told me that certain forms of literature were autonomous when they were not and how long it took me to realize this” (110). In her conclusion, she reasserts this position, writing that the text is an “auto-ethnographic project, an attempt to describe the way literature circulates in the very scenes in which I also circulate” (191). Read in this way, Spahr’s conversational tone and digressive flourishes embody an auto-ethnographic style, creating a space wherein she turns her subject matter, American literary nationalism, outward facing. The book thereby straddles the expectations of an ivory tower audience and the persistent call to render scholarship more accessible through the public humanities. Spahr is largely successful in creating an informal, stylistic atmosphere for this hybrid readership as she struggles with how literary autonomy seems to always be already infiltrated by nationalistic agendas that reach back into the global cold war and how the CIA influenced postcolonial (especially African) national literatures. Owing to this personal struggle for (and ultimate failure of) literary autonomy, Spahr’s text is pervaded by a tone of inevitability, which I suggest points to a certain US-pessimism, given the challenge to American exceptionalism in the twenty-first century. D U N C A N M. Y O O N