“Life Writing: Constructing Identity and the Question of Race. Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father and Martin Luther King’s Biography and speeches” offers a close reading of Barack Obama’s “Dreams from My Father” and Martin Luther King’s Biography and his most inspiring speeches particularly with regard to the issues of (African)- American identity, race and the concept of life writing. This work compares two important political African-American personae based on the background of slave history and the question whether identity can be constructed or whether it is given and strongly connected to ethnicity. The terms identity, ethnicity and post-ethnicity are challenged in their meaning and the analysis shows that neither unity of all factors nor polarization of one are satisfying answers to the questions of race and identity.
Sabrina Malerz
Barack Obama Life Writing Post- Ethnicity