Exhuming the good that men do: The play of the mnemonic imagination in the making of an autoethnographic text

Abstract

This paper, which is an autoethnographic text in its own right, examines class, gender and education through highlighting the processes at work and the resources drawn upon in the making of autoethnographic texts. At its centre is a poem about my father, which acts as an illustration of how such artefacts exert agency across time, through the play of what Keighley and Pickering refer to as ‘the mnemonic imagination’, enabling a re-interpretation of the past in the present and on into the future. Using the work of feminist scholars Steedman and Walkerdine, the paper offers an insight into the way cultural analyses and ‘affective histories’ make sense of the fortunes of a ‘Scholarship Girl’. At the same time, in exhuming an instance of the good that men do in the form of a crucial intervention in my life by my father, it pays homage to what the poet Robert Hayden called the performance of ‘love’s austere and lonely offices’ plus.