Filiation in Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father

• Published in: Life writing Vol. 9; no. 3; pp. 259 - 267
• Main Author: Couser, G. Thomas
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Taylor & Francis Group 01.09.2012
• Subjects: African; African American; Barack Obama; filiation; patriography
• ISSN: 1448-4528; 1751-2964
• DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2012.689945

Although Obama's memoir served, well after its initial publication in 1995, as a campaign autobiography in a historic election, it interests me primarily as an example of an emerging type of American life writing, which I call patriography: life writing about fathers by their sons or daughters. Like its companion subgenre matriography, patriography is inherently relational and inter-subjective life writing. It is also, of course, intergenerational: it attempts to negotiate or understand a family legacy as passed on from father to son, an act I call filiation. The memoir takes its title, and its conception, from a father who was unavailable to his son by virtue of early abandonment, geographical distance, and early death. In part because of those factors, but also because his father's life trajectory proved so disappointing, Obama has to look beyond his father as a model of behaviour to his larger legacy. In any case, by affiliating himself with his African father, Obama looks beyond the shores of the US to create an identity that is, if not post-racial, multi-racial and multi-ethnic. Rather than situate himself squarely within the African-American struggle against oppression, then, Obama fashions out of his father's legacy a more global and forward-looking heritage.