Producing American Selves: The Form of American Biography

Abstract

1. James Clifford, 'Hanging Up Looking Glasses at Odd Corners': Ethnobiographical Prospects, in Studies in Biography, ed. Daniel Aaron (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 44. Clifford urges Western biographers-such as his father-to use modernist and cross-cultural models that might enact self-doubling, discontinuity, flux, social de-centering. For an ethnographic analysis of the way 'the self' is culturally constituted within arbitrary meaning-systems and discursive regimes, also see James Clifford, On Ethnographic Self-Fashioning: Conrad and Malinowski and other essays in Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought, ed. Thomas Heller, Morton Sosna, and David Wellbery (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 140-62; and Robert Sullivan, Marxism and the 'Subject' of Anthropology, in Modernist Anthropology: From Fieldwork To Text, ed. Marc Manganaro (Princeton: Princeton Uni-