ARI Working Paper Series

Many of the national leaders associated with the Non-Aligned Movement in both Asia and Africa wrote widely-disseminated autobiographies. Though influential, these narratives are frequently neglected by both historical and literary studies of decolonization, yet they form a dense intertextual network, each building on and responding to its predecessors. National autobiographies written by figures such as Jawaharlal Nehru, Kwame Nkrumah and Sukarno map the unfolding of an individual life onto the narrative of a nation’s self-discovery and achievement of maturity though independence from the colonial power, in the process creating a social imaginary which represents the postcolonial state as an autonomous individual, embodied in the person of the “father of the nation.” Yet if the social imaginaries these texts create are gendered, they are also complex and contradictory. Narratives which appear as the product of and autonomous, heroic masculinity are frequently written in collaboration with women, or with female characters in crucial relational roles.

Viewed as literary texts concerned with the process of postcolonial self-fashioning, these narratives challenge many of the orthodoxies of auto/biography studies, suggesting the need for a more nuanced and historicized approach to questions of community and individual identity in the analysis of life writing that explores issues of postcoloniality, diaspora, or globalization.