"When I Accept All Changes": Crafting, Expanding, and Exhausting the Auto/ Biographical in Sayed Kashua's Track Changes

Abstract

Abstract:This article examines the interface of forms of auto/biographical writing and literary criticism, and how postcolonial life writers draw attention to the exhaustion of the formal and structural conditions of the genre as conventionally established and understood. Looking at Palestinian author Sayed Kashua's Track Changes (2020), I investigate how life writers draw attention to issues involved in writing and reading auto/biography, such as form, truth-telling, and referentiality, and I interrogate the labor involved in life writing and the subjective and shifting role of the auto/biographer in crafting, expanding, and exhausting the genre in a way that reflects political and cultural identities of postcolonial subjects.