Abstract
Young people have to struggle in navigating the complex cultural and socio-political frameworks of production if they would like to reclaim agency and legitimacy to voice their aspirations. This article focuses on questions of authorship and self-representation in both the traditional and digital life writing texts created by and produced for Sierra-Leonean-American ballet dancer Michaela DePrince, which turns out to be highly mediated by her Jewish Caucasian adoptive mother Elaine DePrince. I argue that the manners of Michaela’s collaborative archive of life narrative projects–which bring about issues of authorship–have conformed her self-representation to particular identity frames in terms of race, power, and access to the tools of representation. Correspondingly, through her traditional and digital advocacy, Michaela has performed as a narrator who depicts white privilege and colourblindness in order to appeal to the white middlebrow audience, while at the same time reinforcing the market value of black trauma. © 2020, © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
Document Type
Journal Article
Date of Publication
3-4-2020
Publication Title
Prose Studies
Publisher
Routledge
School
School of Arts and Humanities
RAS ID
34084
Included in
Creative Writing Commons, Family, Life Course, and Society Commons, Race and Ethnicity Commons, Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons
Comments
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in PROSE STUDIES on 04/03/2020, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/01440357.2020.1732040
Adji, A. N. (2020). The weave of youth writing: Refiguring authorship and self-representation in Michaela DePrince’s collaborative archive of life narrative texts. Prose Studies, 41(1), 47 - 65. https://doi.org/10.1080/01440357.2020.1732040