https://at-ceu.studyguide.timeedit.net/modules/GENS5195?type=COREThe course explores the importance oflife-writing (autobiographies, memoirs, diaries, and other similar types oftextual and/or visual production, including autotheory and autofiction) for theoppressed, the focus being on the categories of gender, race, and dislocation.Roughly, the course will consist of three elements that will continuouslyoverlap. (1) We will scrutinize the modes of life-writing: What constituteslife-writing? What is the literary and political relevance of experience? Whathappens to the experience once it is mediated? What is the relation of truthand fiction in life-writing narratives? More specifically: Why werelife-writing practices historically important for the minoritarian groups? Whatkind of subjectivities and identities - both individual and collective - areproduced through life-writing? But also: How does the recent boom oflife-writing production feed into the late capitalist subjectivity? Ourdiscussion will be informed by critical race, decolonial, feminist, and queertheory; as well as literary theory, trauma theory, and memory studies. (2) Wewill read and discuss selected autobiographical and/or autotheoretical textsthat articulate the experiences of gender, race, and dislocation. We will payequal attention to the literary elements of the texts at hand and to theirpolitics, as well as the relation between the two. (3) Finally, we will lookinto minoritarian life-writing as a method: What does it mean to use one's lifeas a resource of research - in terms of personal history, autoethnography, andautotheory? What are the potential conceptual and political issues arisinghere?