Autobiography and National Identity in the Americas. By Steven V. Hunsaker. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1999. xvi, 148 pp.

Reviewed by John D. Hazlett

Stephen V. Hunsaker's Autobiography and National Identity in the
Americas is a cogently written book that makes a very useful contribution to the critical interrogation of the role of collective identity in autobiographical writing. Since the late 1970s, critics and theorists have been examining the function of ethnicity, race, class, gender, generation, and political or religious affiliation in the construction of autobiographical selves. Hunsaker adds to this discussion a valuable monograph on the wide variety of ways in which autobiographers have used the building blocks of language, territory, shared history, myth, and ethnicity to negotiate national identity in the Americas. The key terms in this discussionnation, state, ethnie, and autobiographyserve as the subject of the book's introduction, which is followed by five chapters of textual analyses that begin with narratives that use ethnically-based nationalisms to resist hegemonic notions of nationhood and end with narratives that "pull away from ethnic differentiation toward a broad-based cultural nationalism" (4). On the former end of this spectrum is Rigoberta Menchú's testimonio, Me Llamo Rigoberta Menchú (Guatemala 1983). On the latter end is Richard Rodriguez's Days of Obligation (U.S. 1992). In between are Maria Campbell's Halfbreed (English Canada 1973), Carolina Maria de Jesus' Quarto de despejo (Brazil 1960), Domitila Barrios de Chungara's Si me permiten hablar (Bolivia 1977), Pierre Vallières's Nègres blancs d'Amérique (French Canada 1968), Omar Cabezas' La montaña es algo más que una inmensa estepa verde (Nicaragua 1982), Victor Perera's Rites (Guatemala 1985), and Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior (U.S. 1976).

The central term in his study, "nation," is one over which experts disagree, but all definitions, according to Hunsaker, make reference to "territory, history, and some shared means of self-definition (whether linguistic, religious, or ancestral)" (2). Although much of his book serves as a qualification of Benedict Anderson's concept of the nation, Hunsaker relies on that theorist for the useful notion that the nation "becomes meaningful when it is imagined as a limited, sovereign community" (1). Since ethnicity plays such a large role in many of the texts he examines, Hunsaker also enlists Anthony D. Smith's idea that the "ethnie" or "ethnic community" must be distinguished from the nation because it lacks economic and legal unity (3). Hunsaker chooses "nation" over "ethnie" as his working term because the autobiogra

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phers he examines most frequently concern themselves with groups that live within "an aggressive nation that encompasses several ethnicities" (3). Hunsaker's most important notion, however, is "national identity," and his insistence, following Anderson, on that concept as a construct, rather than an essence, is fundamental to many of his arguments. National identity, for Hunsaker, is not a matter of race or place, but the "ability to imagine oneself as part of a national community" (3); because "national identity is an act of imagination, there is no guarantee that a group of potential compatriots will imagine the community uniformly" (4). What this insight means in practice is that the particular form the imagined nation takes in a work is always strategic and ideological, rather than a reflection of a unanimously held idea or essence. To understand any autobiographical construction of community, we must consider what purposes it serves (34).

This perception, rigorously applied, leads to Hunsaker's most interesting analyses and far reaching critiques. This is most evident when he examines the collective selves in testimonios, which some theoreticians celebrate as expressions of an authentic tribal, ethnic, or national identity. Hunsaker considers these theorists' concern with authenticity to be a form of false consciousness, the clear result of ideological blinders. Autobiographical selves, in Hunsaker's view, are never authentic or false; they are always constructed. One of the major intentions of his text, therefore, is to highlight the ideological nature of claims to authenticity and collective identity, not only in constructions of national selves, but in constructions of various other collectives related to the national self. Since at least three of his texts (Menchú's, Chungara's, and Cabezas's) are identifiable as testimonios, Hunsaker's emphasis eventually leads readers to question the insistence of theorists such as John Beverley who claim that testimonios are a distinct autobiographical form, essentially rather than merely strategically different from other autobiographies.

Hunsaker, I hasten to say, does not explicitly take issue with Beverley's idea, largely because he assumes the widespread critical acceptance of Philippe Lejeune's definition of autobiography as a "retrospective prose narrative written by a real person concerning his own existence, where the focus is his individual life, in particular the story of his personality" (Lejeune 4; Hunsaker 67, my emphases). Given that definition, of course, many works currently read and taught as autobiography are not autobiographies. But much of Hunsaker's textual analysis, not to mention the work of many feminist and minority theorists over the past two decades, demonstrates that Lejeune's insistence on "individuality" as an essential component of the genre does not adequately reflect current critical or theoretical practice. The tipoff to the narrowness of Lejeune's definition should have been evident in

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its pronouns, all of which are masculine. While Lejeune no doubt intended them to be generic, rather than gendered, the kind of texts he analyzes suggests that they were in fact the latter, for almost all of them are written by men. First published in 1975, just before the critique of masculinist definitions of the genre began to be formulated, Lejeune's definition of the genre was also in keeping with other male-authored studies (especially that of Georges Gusdorf) that limited their focus to the works of men of the dominant classes.

After nearly three decades of discussion, one hesitates to quibble over genre definitions, but in this case, a consideration of the reasons for the argument over what is and what is not autobiography reveals how thoroughly politicized that discussion often is. American feminist critics such as Susan Stanford Friedman have argued that women who write their personal stories often construct the self as other-directed, rather than individualized, and that accepting Lejeune's definition of the genre has the practical effect of excluding such stories from the autobiographical canon and perpetuating the patriarchal relegation of women to second class status.  The construction of the other-directed or collective self, in such critics' view, should be seen as a legitimate and frequently employed task of autobiography proper. Their intentions are political: they see the admittance of women's texts to the genre as a means of achieving recognition of women's selves as fully human, they believe that the notion of selfhood and identity as defined by writers such as Lejeune is narrow and masculinist, and they want to see the genre's definition widened sufficiently to include texts by members of groups whose constructed selves are often not concerned with individualization. John Beverley and other sponsors of the testimonio, on the other hand, are more than happy to adopt Lejeune's definition, because doing so allows them to demonize autobiography as a genre with an inherently oppressive ideological bent. Their goal is to reserve for narrative constructions of collective selves a special precinct separate from autobiography because they wish to draw a firm moral line between their notion of autobiographers (bourgeois writers whose individualist mystifications underlie a capitalist ideology that obscures class, gender, race, and ethnic identities) and testimonialistas (revolutionary selves who understand the true nature of power relations between persons of distinct collective affiliations). If they conceded that testimonio is simply a modal tendency within the genre of autobiography, they would be conceding that testimonialistas are working on the same ethical level as writers who emphasize individuality in their life narratives.

This clash over generic boundaries is one that Hunsaker's argument never fully articulates, but his textual analyses suggest that testimonio secessionists fail to acknowledge that all narratives of the self are nec

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essarily acts of negotiation between the individual author and the various collectives that make up his or her world. The strategies authors employ in this negotiation, for Hunsaker, are the central features of the text, the ones most in need of identification and analysis. Put another way, the testimonio secessionists focus their critical energies on the text's collective self, taking for granted its authenticity and essential difference. Hunsaker, on the other hand, insists on the impossibility of authenticity in any construction of collective identity and focuses his critical energies on the ideological program underlying the individual author's assertion of collectivity. By that, I do not mean that he denigrates or condemns those who construct such selves or that he thinks that collectives do not exist in the real world. They do, but not as the homogeneous univocal entities that their authors (and some theoreticians) make them out to be. One of the virtues of Hunsaker's text is that it demonstrates that the testimonialista's claim to collective identity is a narrative strategy like any other, neither more nor less natural than those employed by individualist authors.

When it comes to specific textual analyses, the best chapters in Hunsaker's book are the ones on Rigoberta Menchú and Richard Rodriguez, and the reason for this is that his examination of narrative strategies as ideologically motivated means of negotiating relationships between individuals and various "imagined communities" leads to real insights about their texts and the state of current autobiographical theory. Since the publication of David Stoll's work on Menchú, which also came out in 1999 (Hunsaker doesn't mention him), the Guatemalan Nobel Prize winner's book has received a good deal of ideological scrutiny. Unlike Stoll, however, Hunsaker is not concerned with the referential veracity of Menchú's book so much as the a priori assumption, on the part of critics, that the collective self that it constructs is natural or authentic and therefore exempt from ideological analysis. For Hunsaker, what is interesting in Menchú is her invention of an authentic Quiché culture to oppose to the national identity enforced by the Guatemalan state. What he sees in her work is not "a revolutionary practice that preserves traditional culture," but a survivalist strategy that combines diverse cultural practices, resulting in a text that demonstrates an "eroded confidence in traditional cultural values" while paradoxically creating an "`invented tradition'" (20).

Rodriguez, on the other end of the political spectrum from Menchú, nonetheless employs similar strategies in his Days of Obligation. Hunsaker looks at his autobiography because Rodriguez's status as the child of immigrants makes his relationship to national identity problematic and because "his controversial positions on ethnic identity . . . and the critical response to them illustrate the ideological nature of

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authenticity" and imagined communities (109). According to Hunsaker, the largely negative critical response to Rodriguez's book reveals an "underlying anxiety regarding the authenticity of those who either disavow or move toward new forms of ethnic identity" (109). Because the academic community has expectations of those who "belong" to specific ethnic or national identities, it has difficulty accounting for or accepting writers who resist them. These expectations, as Hunsaker shows, are based on the assumption that ethnic and national identities are "natural or unchosen" (113). Academics approve of Menchú's testimonio because the Quiché identity it constructs accords with their essentialist expectations of what that identity should be, and they condemn Rodriguez's book because it scorns their essentialist notion of La Raza and substitutes in its place another, equally essentialist, notion of Indian culture as one that eagerly adopts "white cultural practices." Turning his critics' position upside down, Rodriguez argues that those Indians who do not assimilate are not true to their own nature, but posing as romanticized Indian caricatures for ideological reasons (116). This, at least, is one of his strategies. At other times, as Hunsaker and Rodriguez's political critics show, he constructs his assimilation as the product of his own choosing, as a demonstration of the American myth of individualism. According to Hunsaker, both of these narrative moves demonstrate Rodriguez's awareness that the Indian he posits is a ploy rather than an essence, that fundamentally "`America' and `being American' are all about ideology" (113). Though Rodriguez's detractors criticize him for his political naïveté, Hunsaker joins Rodriguez by turning the accusation around: "There is frequent criticism of individualism in the criticism of Rodriguez but, to my best knowledge, no corresponding scrutiny of ethnicity as ideology. The lack is significant" (113). I should add that however much Hunsaker is intrigued by Rodriguez as a narrative strategist, he by no means endorses Rodriguez's politics. As he points out, Rodriguez is "less than sufficiently reflective concerning, for example, the economic consequences of his individualist choices" (113).

The other three chapters in Hunsaker's book, though well worth reading, are not quite as strong as these two. This is partly because they rely on less productive theoretical concepts as their point of entry into the texts. For example, chapter two applies Maria Lugones's concepts of "thickness" and "transparency" to the autobiographies of Campbell, de Jesus, and Chungara in order to characterize these writers' identification with, or resistance to, various collective identities, especially class, gender, ethnicity, and nation. According to Lugones's terminology, individuals are transparent when they identify themselves wholly with the community and its values; individuals are thick when

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they see themselves as apart (34). While these terms serve as handy ways of identifying an autobiographer's relationship to community, they do not provide very suggestive tools for analysis. And curiously, Hunsaker doesn't go much beyond the mechanical application of the terms to the authors' construction of various selves, leaving unexamined their ideological and strategic functions. "Transparency," in particular, is precisely the sort of narrative feature that Hunsaker subjects to a very close analysis in his treatment of the testimonios of Cabezas and Menchú. But in this chapter, Chungara's transparency in relationship to "the people" is depicted as a kind of triumph, an achievement that is lacking in the more depressing (and by implication less successful) works of Campbell and de Jesus, both of whose narrative selves remain relatively thick in relation to their respective communities. I'm not sure why Hunsaker exempts Chungara's work from the kind of close ideological analysis that he applies with such acuity to other works, and it might have been useful if he had performed a closer comparison of her book with, say, Cabezas's, on this level.

In chapter three, Hunsaker uses the concept of "myth" to analyze the autobiographies of Vallières and Cabezas. The concept, he says, has two valences: positive when it refers to "narratives or codes whose ideological function is to instill in the citizens of a state or in the members of a group a sense of shared history, destiny, and revolutionary potential," and negative when it signifies a code that "justifies and perpetuates a senselessly oppressive way of life" (62).  The negative sense of the term gets most critical mileage in Hunsaker's look at Vallières's book, which Hunsaker analyses as a recounting of its author's efforts to deconstruct certain nationalist Québécois myths "that justify the continuing isolation of the Québécois" and to replace them with Marxist myths that will serve as a means for the liberation and advancement of his people. Omar Cabezas's book, in contrast, "exploits myths of the Nicaraguan national essence as an outlet for the new sense of personal identity that follows his experiences as a guerrillero, but also to depict the FSLN as the embodiment of the united popular will" (63). In this chapter, however, Hunsaker consistently applies his principle that collective identities are strategic ideologically-charged constructions. It is in his discussion of Cabezas, in fact, that he comes closest to articulating a critique of Beverley's privileging of testimonio by viewing the Nicaraguan author's "we" as a strategy that "levels the differences between people to create an impression of unanimity" (73). It is precisely this conscious leveling that Beverley's formulation of testimonio ignores. As Hunsaker says, that formulation does not allow "for a feigned alignment with the group that an author has decided to call `the people,' nor is there allowance for narrative strategies that em

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phasize oppression, marginalization, and group identity as much to build support for their political programs as to bring into question the `stability and complacency of the reader's world'" (74).

Hunsaker's chapter four raises a number of interesting issues in relation to autobiographies written by the children of immigrants. Perera's and Kingston's texts, he claims, provide evidence that Anderson's "unfailingly hopeful" thesis that national identity is the result of language, rather than blood, ignores the complicating factors of border crossings, which almost always comes at a price, such as inevitable conflicts between immigrant children and their parents, the forced "redefinition" of natives and immigrants as members of a national community, and the complicated questions of loyalty and desire (85). The chapter proceeds, like chapter two, from an author who is not so successful in negotiating the relationship between individual and national identity to one who is very successful. Part of the reason for this, of course, is the nature of the two countries in which these authors grew up. Perera's Rites recounts the difficulties the author faced as a Jewish child in anti-semitic Guatemala. A shared national language could not, in his case, bridge the gap between him and the Christian children or facilitate his identification with the Guatemalan nation. Ultimately, Perera is left with no collective with which to identify (95). Kingston, by contrast, is not rejected by the community in which she lives and manages to create an American identity for herself. Her parents, like Perera's, reject the identity offered by the adopted community, but the young Maxine embraces it and works to become "transparent" (96). One of most conspicuous strategies she employs for that purpose is to imagine "herself in terms of multiple associations rather than binary oppositions" (99), thus managing to "preserve family and collective identity in the predominantly individualist setting of the United States" (99). Though critics have been far kinder to Kingston than to Rodriguez, she has met with some of the same criticism regarding her relationship to ethnic community:  her detractors want her to assume a representative identity consistent with their notions of an essential Asianness, while she insists on individuality. In Hunsaker's formulation, "While an autobiographer may create an identity through relationships of consent, others may insist that relationships of descent invalidate that creation" (101).

There are many reasons to read Hunsaker's book. It makes a very useful contribution to the on-going discussion of the role of collective identity in autobiographical writing, especially in its consideration of national identity in the context of other group affiliations, such as gender, race, ethnicity, and class. Most importantly, it demonstrates the flexibility and negotiability of each of those terms as authors struggle

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to define the nation in ways that suit their own political and personal needs. It also provides perceptive readings of nine important autobiographies and shows how similar concerns with national and ethnic identity are shared throughout the Americas. Finally, his investigation of the role of collectives in self constructions raises important questions that should force us to think again about the relationship between the various modes of autobiographical writing.

University of New Orleans

Works Cited

• Beverley, John. "The Margin at the Center: On Testimonio." De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women's Autobiography. Ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1992. 91_114.
• Friedman, Susan Stanford. "Women's Autobiographical Selves: Theory and Practice." The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women's Autobiographical Writings. Ed. Shari Benstock. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1988. 3462.
• Gusdorf, Georges. "Conditions and Limits of Autobiography." Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Ed. James Olney. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980. 2848
• Lejeune, Philippe. On Autobiography. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Trans. Katherine Leary. Theory and History of Literature, vol. 52. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989.
• Stoll, David. I, Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans. Boston: Westview, 1999.