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Despite the range and abundance of autobiographical writing from the Anglophone Caribbean, this book is the first to explore this literature fully. It covers works from the colonial era up to present-day AIDS memoirs and assesses the links between more familiar works by George Lamming, C. L. R. James, Derek Walcott, V. S. Naipaul, and Jamaica Kincaid and less frequently cited works by the Hart sisters, Mary Prince, Mary Seacole, Claude McKay, Yseult Bridges, Jean Rhys, Anna Mahase, and Kamau Brathwaite. Sandra Pouchet Paquet charts the intersection of multiple, contradictory viewpoints of the colonial and postcolonial Caribbean, differing concepts of community and levels of social integration, and a persistent pattern of both resistance and accommodation within island states that were largely shaped by British colonial practice from the mid-seventeenth through the mid-twentieth century. The texts examined here reflect the entire range of autobiographical practice, including the slave narrative and testimonial, written and oral narratives, spiritual autobiographies, fiction, serial autobiography, verse, diaries and journals, elegy, and parody.

September 1955. Six-year-old Mark O'Brien moved his arms and legs for the last time. He came out of a thirty-day coma to find himself enclosed from the neck down in an iron lung, the machine in which he would live for much of the rest of his life. How I Became a Human Being is Mark O'Brien's account of his struggles to lead an independent life despite a lifelong disability. In 1955, he contracted polio and became permanently paralyzed from the neck down. O'Brien describes growing up without the use of his limbs, his adolescence struggling with physical rehabilitation and suffering the bureaucracy of hospitals and institutions, and his adult life as an independent student and writer. Despite his weak physical state, O'Brien attended graduate school, explored his sexuality, fell in love, published poetry, and worked as a journalist. A determined writer, O'Brien used a mouthstick to type each word. O'Brien's story does not beg for sympathy. It is rather a day-to-day account of his reality--the life he crafted and maintained with a good mind, hired attendants, decent legislation for disabled people in California, and support from the University of California at Berkeley. He describes the ways in which a paralyzed person takes care of the body, mind, and heart. What mattered most was his writing, the people he loved, his belief in God, and his belief in himself.

Who Am I? is the bittersweet memoir of a Chinese American who came to this country as a twenty-year-old graduate student and stayed to become one of America's most innovative intellectuals, whose work has explored the aesthetic and moral dimensions of human relations with landscape, nature, and environment. This unusually introspective autobiography mixes Yi-Fu Tuan's reflections on a life filled with recognition, accolades, and even affection -- all signs of success -- with a deep sense of personal failure.The son of a prominent Chinese diplomat, Tuan moved from a cosmopolitan childhood to a relatively quiet life as an academic in the United States, where his books on topics as diverse as the cultural role of pets and the moral implications of urban design have met with international scholarly and public acclaim. Yet, Tuan finds his life increasingly marked by detachment and isolation. In Who Am I?, he probes what he sees as his moral failings, his lack of courage -- including the courage to be open about his homosexuality -- resulting, as he writes, "in a life that is seamed in ambivalence -- achingly empty at the core, despairingly alone, yet often content, occasionally even happy, " as when he catches glimpses of heaven in his exploration of the beautiful and the good.