A poetics of resistance: Reading revolutionary memoirs as artifacts of the imagination.

Abstract

The majority of literary analyses of autobiography has concerned the nature of the relationship of the self to language and the text. Although the literary approach to autobiography has allowed the genre to be received in legitimate literary studies, the study of autobiography has just begun to contribute ethnographic descriptions of human behaviors in sub-groups or cultures as a way of understanding those groups. This study proposes a sub-genre of autobiography, those which emphasize the authors' political resistance activities, and groups these "resistance memoirs" into three classifications: memoirs of self-determination, prison experience, and revolutionary upheavals. This study proposes using an anthropological approach to the behavior of political resistance, and a literary analysis approach to the writing of the memoirs as a way of seeing the patterns of symbolism and metaphor that dominate the authors' own interpretation of his or her activity. Analyzing the authors' political activities as they are textualized reveals the system of resistance. Reading the system of resistance allows us to scrutinize transgression at work. Like any system, resistance is contradictory, paradoxical, and transformative. This study thus proposes to show how resistance activities, as well as resistance memoirs, originate in the human imagination as creative processes. The texts of each set display the creative and transformative ritual activity in consistently patterned ways analyzable in the mode of ethnographic descriptions of ritual behavior, especially ritualized social and cultural transgression. The theoretical fundamentals of both symbolic anthropology and literary interpretation are applied to the behavior of political resistance in order to allow us to read the behavior as a system, a human artifact imaginatively designed--as any art form--to provoke a certain understanding of the world.