ABSTRACT

This essay deliberates about theoretical and creative approaches to a work-in-progress. Using the conceit of visiting the author’s birthday each year to depict an individual’s relationship with world events, she aims to combine personal and collective history into an autohistory of the late twentieth century. Exploring methods for telling a unique story involves addressing problems of representation, accuracy and artistic expression. Considering the contribution from poststructuralist theory and literature unlocks a door towards experimentation in both expressing and uniting disparate themes. Creative techniques help to unravel the connections between strands of historiographic, feminist, post-colonialist and queer theory, leading to reflections on genre-bending and how to draw diverse meanings from sources and imagination. Reflecting on trends in oral history and ‘history from below’, the author conjures her own inventive autoethnographic journey through the genres of memoir, journal, autofiction and autobiography, and encounters problems in assessing the relative value of different primary and secondary sources. Furthermore, in writing about others as well as the self, issues arise regarding representation and the politics of giving voice to hidden stories. The essay concludes that using polyphonic voices and fictional devices within the nonfiction framework can provide a way to tell history through a personal artistic medium.

KEYWORDS

practice-based research, collective history, memoir, colonial legacy, queer theory, feminist theory, nonfiction, polyphonic voices.