To harness discontent: Michelle Obama’s becoming as African American autobiography

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Ágnes Zsófia Kovács

Abstract

Michelle Obama’s Becoming has become the best known memoir by an ex-First Lady ever. Traditional as the First Lady’s role and the First Lady’s memoir genre are, Becoming has shifted the terms through which to define both. Instead of the insider’s story about the public husband by the domestic wife it represents the basic American story of a self-made strong woman invested in the life of the community. This paper reads Becoming and charts its statements about finding one’s voice, opting to work for the community, and choosing hope over despair as not so much a personal but rather as a communal story of a not so well definable group. To get a better glimpse of the actual appeal of the story, the paper investigates where this project comes from, what its modes of existence are, how it is circulated, what subject positions it determines. Becoming can be read as political commentary in the sense of antebellum autobiographical slave narratives that had aimed to trigger political change by personal testimony. Another intertextual influence can be African American women’s fiction and autobiography where the theme of finding one’s voice in the context of double oppression is vital. The story defines the subject position of an ‘empowered’ black feminine subject.

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How to Cite
Kovács, Ágnes Zsófia. 2018. “To Harness Discontent: Michelle Obama’s Becoming As African American Autobiography”. AMERICANA E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary 14 (2). https://www.americanaejournal.hu/index.php/americanaejournal/article/view/45411.
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Essays
Author Biography

Ágnes Zsófia Kovács

Ágnes Zsófia Kovács is associate professor at the Department of American Studies, University of Szeged, Hungary. Her research interests include late 19th-century proto-modern fiction, conversions of literary modernism and postmodernism, popular fiction genres, contemporary multicultural American fiction, theories of narrative, and methods of American Studies. Her current research into travel writing involves re-mapping travel texts by Edith Wharton. She has published two books, The Function of the Imagination in the Writings of Henry James (Mellen, 2006) and Literature in Context (Jate Press, 2010), and she has co-edited Space, Gender and the Gaze (Cambridge Scholars, 2017). She served as guest editor for AMERICANA in 2008 and 2016, with the issues ‘Multiculturalism in American Literature and Art’ and ‘Henry James Appropriated;’ and edited Jon Roberts’ A Life Less Damnable for Americana E-books in 2013. Email: akovacs@lit.u-szeged.hu

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