Introduction – Autoethnography and Beyond: Colonialism, Immigration, Embodiment, and Belonging

Life Writing’s choice to feature twenty-first century autoethnography offers interpretive, analytic, interactive, performative, experiential, and embodied forms of constructed self and culture in writing around the globe. It captures a broad range of autobiographical and anthropological intersections shared from Australia, Canada, China, Egypt, Turkey, and the USA in two parts. This first issue ‘Autoethnography and Beyond: Colonialism, Immigration, Embodiment, and Belonging,’ gathers recent applications of autoethnography as a decolonising and dehegemonising practice in the allegedly post-racial, post-colonial, and post-(hetero)sexist twenty-first century. Derived from colonial populations in which peoples have been systematically denied by modern anthropology the ability to record their experiences and explore the subjectivities, in their own voices, autoethnographic practices referred to as ‘native ethnography’ emerged as a post-colonial practice enabling subjects to engage with their representers on their own terms ( Pratt 1992 , 7). The continued expansion of autoethnography’s applications in the twentieth century showed ethnographers’ first efforts to acknowledge their presence as narrators of their fieldwork accounts. Deemed ‘autobiographical ethnography,’ the hybrid genre gave way to cultural anthropologists’ experimentation with interjecting self-exploration into their ethnographic writing ( Reed-Danahay 1997 , 2). Tracts of detailed ‘thick description’ in which they narrated their observations of their subjects’ cultures gave way to mutually biographical cultural explication in which the interpretive and experiential lens of the narrative of the anthropologist’s subjectivity became more transparent ( Geertz 1973 , 15). This new form reframed the authority of the ethnographer’s knowledge as second to that of the populations their representations had marginalised and took the first steps toward acknowledging the ideological hegemony of anthropologists ‘speaking for’ their subjects of investigation. In this issue, the innovative forms of resistance to dominant forms of representation include critiques of the academic job market, caregiving, parenthood, and museum curation where this issue’s contributors problematise the paradigms of insider/outsider, work/family, and spectacle/spectator with critically self-reflective accounts of our human condition in its embodiment and need for belonging.

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