The discourse of autobiographical intention: An analysis of selected Kenyan autobiographies

Abstract

The death and resurrection of the author has made for interesting discourse since Wimsatt and Beardsley famously attacked the author’s intention in writing as a fallacious presumption in 1946 and Barthes declared, in 1967, the death of the author, to when critics such as Carlier and Watts resurrected her/him in the first decade of the new milleum.  By anchoring itself on Autobiographical theory, particularly on the tenets of Linda Anderson and Francis Hart, and by lending itself to a critical methodology of textual evaluation, this article particularises the discourse of intentionality in the genre of autobiography by making a close reading of selected Kenyan autobiographies: Not yet Uhuru, Walking in Kenyatta Struggles; My Story and Unbowed; One Woman’s Story. The article argues that the significance of intentionality in authorship gains credence in the emerging critical engagement in marginality, particularly on women’s writing, writing on differently sexualised bodies, writing on differently abled bodies and equally significant in the emerging narratives of re-imagining the postcolonial project of national construction and citizenship. The article argues that to thematise these spaces the re-instantiation of the subjective presence of the author in time and place is as significant as the re-instantiation of her/his voice.