How Do I Begin To Tell a Story that Has Not Been Told? Anarchism, Autoethnography, and the Middle Ground

Abstract

As a testament to the growing literature on autoethnography and my own connections to systemic and direct racism, this article is a therapeutic way to explore my past through the ancient way of telling, testifying, and developing knowledge through narrative inquiry. Testimony opens new ways of looking at the world by participating in a subversive form of scholarship. Indigenous scholars have claimed that stories play a vital role in transmitting who we are. Through my experiences, I explore the concept of “the middle ground” and the spaces of identity created by complex relationships of power. Similar to the literature on borders, “go-betweens” dance across worlds and exist in spaces wrought with alienation, discovery, transmission, and cooperation. I also argue that anarchist theory and praxis can inform larger autoethnographic writing, pushing radicals to include narrative inquiry into their own communities and praxis through an exploration of self. In this way, we can begin the difficult process of theorizing from our own locations that includes moments of intense pain, shame, and triumph that life sometimes brings us.

Abraham P. DeLeon is an assistant professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio in the department of Educational Leadership & Policy Studies. His research interests are interdisciplinary, spanning cultural studies, critical pedagogy, anarchist theory, space and place, postcolonial theory, and autoethnography.

Notes

1. “Multinaries” is an idea adapted from the work of Jacques Derrida (1978) that pushes his deconstruction beyond just being concerned with eschewing binary representations (such as man/woman or reason/madness) by recognizing that multiple realities exist and should be placed on a continuum of social experiences and identities. This resists dominant binary constructions that tend to reproduce simplistic understandings of social, cultural, political, and economic realities and gives us a new language in which to capture these complex lived experiences (see Barker, 2008; Derrida, 1978).