Panel: Colonial Encounters and Problems of Translation
Copanelists: Chris Barry and Joanna Kordus
Paul John Eakin’s influential essay “Relational Selves, Relational Lives: Autobiography and the Myth of Autonomy” (1999) altered how scholars in this field discussed the differences between men’s and women’s life writing. While Eakin celebrates the contributions of feminist scholars who argued that the Gusdorf model of selfhood “did not fit the contours of women’s lives” (47), he critiques the subsequent male-female binary that was established. Arguing that “all selfhood . . . is relational despite differences that fall out along gender lines” (50), he essentially ended discussions that tried to clarify what might be men’s versus women’s styles of writing or ways of identifying oneself.
However, in this very same essay, when Eakin makes reference to works by Indigenous autobiographers, he refers his audience to an essay by Arnold Krupat entitled “Native American Autobiography and the Synecdochic Self” (1992). This is despite the fact that key to Krupat’s argument is his articulation of a binary almost identical to the one Eakin has already critiqued. (Krupat describes the self in Euroamerican life-writing as metonymic to indicate that it is individualistic, autonomous, and expressed through linear narrative, while the self in Native American life writing is synecdochic, communal, relational, and expressed in discontinuous, nonteleological narrative forms.)
My paper will consider Eakin’s oversight as a problem of translation from one discipline, autobiography studies, to another, Native American literary studies, as well as from one culture, of mainstream academia, to another, Indigenous scholarship. Speaking from my position as a Cree- Métis woman and literary critic, I am mindful of the injunctions by Native American scholars that I be responsive and politically relevant to my own community. I expand Eakin’s idea of “Relational Selves” by translating it into Cree, using the concept of Wahkootowin, which roughly means the interrelationship of all things.
Deanna Reder’s main fields of study are Indigenous literatures in Canada, Indigenous literary theories and epistemologies, and autobiography theory. She is Assistant Professor at Simon Fraser University, and teaches 75 percent in the First Nations Studies Program and 25 percent in the Department of English. As a Cree- Métis scholar, she is working on a monograph on Cree and Métis autobiography in Canada. Currently she is co-editing an anthology with Linda Morra (Bishop’s University) on the Trickster in Canadian literature. Her work has appeared in Studies in Canadian Literature, American Indian Quarterly, and Creating Community: A Roundtable on Canadian Aboriginal Literatures.