When the Personal Isn’t Autobiographical

Abstract Why is the personal so routinely assumed to be synonymous with the autobiographical, particularly in documents addressed to a readership that is public insofar as it is non-academic? My essay opens by considering the recent outpouring of autobiographical writing by minoritarian scholars. I then examine approaches to the personal mode that are conversational rather than non-autobiographical. My examples of first-person conversation include scholarship by Teresia Teaiwa, Mimi Khúc, and Christina Sharpe. I devote special attention to Max Liboiron, whose use of conversational footnotes establishes a connection between how one inhabits the page and how one inhabits the world. Through these scholars, I suggest that recent experiments in voice, genre, perspective, and style help us identify new problems and ask different questions about the production and legitimation of knowledge. Specifically, I’m interested in how styles of conversationality can shift our scholarly orientation toward giving acknowledgment rather than authorizing knowledge.