From Margin to Centre: Postcolonial Identities and Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father

Abstract

This article considers Barack Obama's autobiography, Dreams from My Father (1995), as extending a tradition of African-American life writing that is characterised by negotiations of identity. It examines how Obama draws upon the rhetorical and literary strategies evident in nineteenth-century narratives and twentieth-century re-workings of the original African-American autobiographical form. The article suggests ways in which Dreams from My Father can also be viewed in relation to postcolonial theory and postcolonial life writing. Therefore, as well as focusing on the relationship between Obama's memoir and African-American autobiography, I also examine the links between postcolonial life writing and contemporary theory in relation to both Dreams from My Father and Obama's Presidential acceptance speech. The article aims to contribute to contemporary re-theorisations of the meaning of postcolonial that seek to expand the notion of a postcolonial canon to include not only the subject at the ‘periphery' but also those at the ‘centre' in the twenty-first century. Obama articulates a transnational and collective consciousness in his attempt to accommodate difference and the individual.