Description of Alexie's New Autoethnography

1285 Words3 Pages

Sherman Alexie’s novel, “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” centers on a Native American boy living on an Indian reservation. Junior, who has been living on the same reservation that his family has been living on for generations, leaves the reservation his freshmen year of high school to attend a white school. Through his transition of cultural boundaries, Junior encounters white Americans speaking the language of white, common, American teenagers. Through his experience, Junior writes a diary. The language Alexie uses for Jumior’s communications in his “diary” establishes the novel as an autoethnographic text, but in the sense that the different “languages” are actually within the same language.
In her 1990 keynote address at the second Modern Language Association Literacy Conference in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Mary Louis Pratt coined and defined the term “autoethnography” as a “text in which people undertake to describe themselves in ways that engage with representations others have made of them” (Pratt 501). In other words, autoethnography is when a person from one culture speaks about themselves in the terms of another culture so that people of that culture can better understand the speaker’s culture.
Pratt’s terminology becomes more complex when introduced alongside the definitions of acculturation and assimilation. Acculturation means adopting cultural traits or social patterns of another group. Assimilation is the merging of cultural traits from previously distinct cultural groups. Delving deeper into the definition of acculturation and assimilation reveals the terms marginal and metropolitan. A marginal culture is one which its people lose importance and are not fully integrated. A metropolitan...

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...of the speech community, because he is bound to the community by a common language. This allows Junior’s writing to be that much more truthful and natural.
By reading and understanding that Junior’s language is similar to his or her own, the reader can identify that much more with the character. Although the reader cannot identify on the exact same level of Junior’s culture and ancestry, through the common speech, the reader can identify with the commonality in the language as a human quality, not a quality of culture, as is the nature of Alexie’s new type of autoethnograpy.

Works Cited

Alexie, Sherman, and Ellen Forney. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.
New York: Little, Brown, 2007. Print.

Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Ways of Reading. Ed. David
Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s 2008. Print.

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