Writing rites gone wrong: Autobiography, testimonials, and their relevance to the debate around genital alterations

Abstract

After briefly examining the discursive asymmetry in writings about excision (as I call it in my book Between Rites and Rights [Stanford UP, 2007]) and circumcision, I discuss four moments in the literary history of autobiographies around male circumcision-the seventeenth-century confessions from Conversos in Spain and Portugal; two Kenyan ethnoautobiographies from the 1960s, Mugo Gatheru's Child of Two Worlds and Karari Najama's Mau Mau From Within; Jacques Derrida's Circumfession introduce a necessary subjectivity and redress the wrongs in what was originally a rite.