Methods for (un)knowing whiteness: A triptych of autoethnography, critical family history, and oral history

Methods for (un)knowing whiteness do not exist within the current methods of narrative study centered on personal experience. This three article dissertation threads together three self-studies using distinct methods of narrative study centered on personal histories: autoethnography, critical family history, and oral history. I engage these methods from the point of departure that whiteness—the white liberal humanist subject—is the problem. Whiteness as the pinnacle of creation was manufactured out of the need to justify global conquest and its primary tools—slavery and genocide. Following Black and Indigenous feminist thinkers, especially Sylvia Wynter and Leanne Betasomasake Simpson, whiteness-as-conquest was manufactured through the stories we tell about ourselves, and two ways out of this predicament are working toward abolition and decolonization. Seen thusly, methods for knowing whiteness are necessary but insufficient for reorienting ourselves toward abolition and decolonization. Abolition and decolonization require methods for unknowing whiteness and making possible other ways of being human. While these methods of narrative studies centered on personal histories can be bent toward abolition and decolonization, these methods may better serve these goals as lenses or approaches to doing autotheory. Ultimately, I suggest autotheory as the methodological intervention on narrative studies centered on personal experience. Autotheory is a blend of Black feminisms, Indigenous feminisms, and queer thought with personal histories. Autotheory is a methodology of knowledge production that seeks to alter our relations to each other and all things. That is, autotheory holds the potential for ontological reordering toward being human after whiteness.Doctor of Philosoph