By Sheri Swayne ’26

Major: English; Minor: Creative Writing

Contributor Biography: Sheri Swayne is a senior from Baltimore, MD, majoring in English with a creative writing minor. She is obsessed with Toni Morrison and writing critical pieces on racial topics. She’s the editor in chief of Collegian, president of Intervarsity, and enjoys reading, R&B, and action movies. If you ever need to have a productive conversation with her, don’t mention chai lattes, Kali Uchis, or Kill Bill.

Brief Description: This essay positions Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barack Obama as a Black life narrative that uses autobiography as a mode of confrontation through the complexities of Black identity. Drawing on Julia Watson and Sidonie Smith’s theories on the autobiography genre, I argue that Obama’s sense of agency emerges through his navigation of  his own identity, the models of blackness he inherited, and the reflective structure of his narrative. Through Obama’s work, autobiography becomes an intervention that insists on the interior complexity of Black identity rather than its response to whiteness. 

The following was written for ENG 394-12: African American Autobiography

The black life narrative, above its participation in the autobiography genre, is a mode of confrontation for black writers to challenge the institutional and interpersonal injustices that have threatened to demolish their sense of self. The documentation of their life trajectories allows for the preservation of the black body and exploration of the black identity, an undertaking in which former President Barack Obama participates with his autobiography, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. Theoretical insights that connect Obama’s life narrative and the identity discourse he experiences with the concept of agency can be gleaned from Julia Watson and Sidonie Smith’s work. The method by which Barack Obama conducts an autobiographical exploration of his black identity is by navigating the complex assemblage that includes Obama himself, the variety of black identities embodied in his father and his high school friend Ray, and the reflective structure of his narrative, identifying an agency that emerges from Obama’s participation in, and confrontation of, the black identity assemblage in which he exists. This wrestling and deep introspection Obama conducts on himself reveals the overlooked complexity of the black identity and its existence outside of its response to whiteness.  

Obama’s relationship with his father participates in the larger assemblage of the black male identity, which contains the impact of his father’s consuming presence and personhood, his sudden abandonment of Obama, the glorified mental image he possesses of his father, and Obama’s resulting reflections as an autobiographer. Much of the complexity of their relationship is derived from the impact his father’s physical presence and essence had on him. Within the first few pages of his father’s appearance in the narrative, Obama recounts how he “often felt mute before him, and he never pushed me to speak” (Obama 66). In his father’s presence, Obama is paralyzed and silenced, suggesting not only that his position in their relationship is peripheral, but that his father does not identify Obama as having a voice, nor does he offer him the opportunity to use it.  

Regardless of this effect, Obama observes and admires the force and assertiveness of his father’s presence, claiming, “It fascinated me, this strange power of his, and for the first time I began to think of my father as something real and immediate, perhaps even permanent” (Obama 67). Obama suggests that the “strange power” of his father’s presence ensures his consistent residence in his life and becomes a quality that allows Obama to imagine him as “real,” “immediate,” and “permanent.” The qualities that Obama’s father embodies are his introduction to black manhood, an experience that “fascinated” him, implying a desire to learn from and continue observing his father. However, this is a key moment in Obama’s identity-building that does not sustain itself, as his father abruptly leaves his life.  

When reflecting on this abandonment later in his narrative, Obama lists the attributes of black manhood that his father embodied: “The brilliant scholar, the generous friend, the upstanding leader” whose voice remained “untainted, inspiring, rebuking, granting, or withholding approval” (Obama 220). The image of black manhood that Obama observes in his father is based on the ability of his mind, his impact and influence on people, and the command and intimidation of his voice; the black man that Obama seeks to become is a formidable figure of excellence, whether in intelligence, sociability, or presence. In another moment of reflection, Obama responds to his father’s advice to “know where you belong” (Obama 114), given in a rare letter, with anger after imagining him “sitting at his desk in Nairobi, a big man in government, with clerks and secretaries bringing him papers to sign…a loving wife and children waiting at home, his own father’s village only a day’s drive away” (Obama 114). This mental image that Obama creates not only causes him anger but serves as an ideal version of his father that was never actualized in his own life, nor one he can achieve.  

Obama’s reasoning for creating this unachievable image is to give his own identity as a black man direction and focus; Obama uses the standards of his father’s black manhood to propel him forward towards the end goal he desires for himself: to be the black man, son of Africa, which his father’s image defined (Obama 220). It is these formative elements of black manhood, which Obama and his father operate in the larger assemblage of, that create room for an agency that allows Obama to process his own identity. With Obama’s father removed from his life, and consequently from much of the narrative, the trajectory of Obama’s identity formation as a black man in America is redirected from adapting his father’s belief system and personhood into his own identity toward a broadening of Obama’s opportunities to self-define. When reflecting on his father’s death, Obama declares, “The king is overthrown…. The rabble of my head is free to run riot; I can do what I damn well please” (Obama 220). Obama has dethroned the sovereign voice over his identity and has claimed ownership over the remaining space, leaving agency to create himself, by himself.  

The value of Smith and Watson’s assemblage theory in relation to the freedom Obama develops after reflecting on his relationship with his father is that both processes have transitional capacity. Smith and Watson claim, “Agency is relocated in assemblages—of humans, materials, systems of distribution, aspects of political economies, technological affordances—as nodes in an ever-shifting confluence of actors” (Smith and Watson 99). The identification of assemblages as “ever-flowing” implies that they are not fixed entities and are subject to fluctuation depending on the network of elements such as “humans,” “materials,” and “systems of distribution.” Just as agency can transition itself between these elements within an assemblage and is thus sustained, Obama’s identity-making transitions from exclusivity in his father’s identity to the broader network of the black identity. The way Obama’s identity-making agency is sustained is the displacement of the “I” of his narrative as the primary authority, a process which Smith and Watson define as the dislodging of “the human actor as the center of operation” (Smith and Watson 99). Obama’s agency to define his own black identity is more accessible when he is not the “center of operation”; his freedom to self-define is not reliant on himself, and thus, it can be enriched and evolved by the distributing nature of assemblages.   

Additional elements that are included in the assemblage of the black identity Obama seeks are situated in his relationship with his high school friend Ray, in which Ray’s embodiment of an easy, confident blackness, as well as Obama’s interrogation and analysis of his qualities and his learning of the caricature of blackness, are positioned within the larger network of his identity. Obama’s relationship with Ray is situated in his transition from deploying his familial relationships as a fundamental determinant of his black identity to exploring blackness in social settings and pop culture, and navigating racial insights from them. After reflecting on how he needed to search for answers about his identity in a place different from his grandparents’ home, he identifies basketball and pop culture as starting points, defining pop culture as “color-coded…an arcade of images from which you could cop a walk, a talk, a step, a style” (Obama 78). Soon after, Obama admits he “was living out a caricature of black male adolescence, itself a caricature of swaggering American manhood” (Obama 79). Obama exhibits an urgency to find the qualities and habits that could solidify his black identity, dedicating himself to fulfilling the role of a “caricature” of blackness and engaging with “color-coded” cultural items to do so.  

In this way, Obama’s self-conscious performance of this caricature reveals an agency in which Obama experiments with his identity within the constraints of blackness. Smith and Watson reference Jacques Rancière’s ideas of agency and performative identity and how he critiques “the notion of a universe of preconstructed individualities and argues for notions of personhood and action that arise out of the materiality of situations” (Smith and Watson 98-99). Ranciere’s assertion that there are no “preconstructed” selves and that personhood is built from material conditions of a social situation offers key insights into Obama’s process of learning how to “wear” blackness. The network of the black identity assemblage, which includes Obama’s relationship with Ray and surrounding identity discourses, allows Obama to operate inside the social scripts, language, and media images of blackness. The cavity between Obama’s caricature of blackness and his journey to authenticity identifies an agency; Obama is actively negotiating between the questions of “what is blackness” and “who best exemplifies it?” which transitions into “what is my blackness and how do I live it?”       

Ray stands as an essential, natural embodiment of blackness and allows Obama to practice and impersonate it, as well as question his place in its community and challenge the qualities of blackness that Ray displays. Obama claims, “Through Ray I would find out about the black parties that were happening at the university or out on the army bases, counting on him to ease my passage through unfamiliar terrain” (Obama 72), identifying Ray as a ticket into the black community on his high school campus and, more importantly, his guide through the “unfamiliar terrain” of a racial identity he is unsure how to claim ownership of. However, as Ray and Obama’s relationship progresses, Obama comes to interrogate the part of Ray’s blackness that is unwilling to justify or truly analyze his reproach for white people. Obama writes, “I would find myself talking to Ray about white folks this or white folks that, and I would suddenly remember my mother’s smile, and the words I spoke would seem awkward and false.” Later, Obama states that “Our rage at the white world needed no object, he seemed to be telling me, no independent confirmation; it could be switched on and off at our pleasure” (Obama 83). The way that Obama experiments with the term “white folks” and with the process of switching his criticism of it on and off, as observed from Ray, exhibits how Obama is resistant to language that directly criticizes his family culture, identifying a self-discovery that Obama’s blackness does not rely on the condemnation of whiteness as Ray’s does.  

When Obama reinforces this developing attribute of his black identity by suggesting he give the “bad-assed nigger pose a rest,” Ray flashes his “trump card,” which attacks Obama’s mixed heritage. Obama responds with a statement of insecurity, claiming “I was different, after all, potentially suspect; I had no idea who my own self was” (Obama 82). Interactions such as these identify a routine of Obama’s identity-discovery in which he learns the language of blackness that fits him, wrestling with the qualities, values, and behaviors of representatives like Ray to do so. The narrative strategy Obama uses to execute this is through his reflection on his observations and experiences. In a token moment of such reflection, Obama considers how, through his relationship with Ray, he “learned to slip back and forth between my black and white worlds, understanding that each possessed its own language and customs and structures of meaning, convinced that with a bit of translation on my part the two worlds would eventually cohere” (Obama 82). The terminology of Obama’s reflection of his divided cultural experience, namely “learned,” “understanding” and “translation,” suggest that by writing his life narrative, Obama is not merely recording the events of his life but truly seeking a deep understanding of himself through the assemblage of elements that create the black identity which he lists: “language and customs and structures of meaning.”  

Smith and Watson conceptualize Obama’s narrative move in terms of agency by claiming agency is “distributed within social situations,” which supports the qualities of an assemblage as “an open-ended collective, a ‘non-totalizing sum’” (Smith and Watson 98, 100). Much of the early chapters in Obama’s narrative, which include his experiences with his father, Ray, and the origin of his identity insecurities, do not reach a moral conclusion. In this sense, the narrative structure of Obama’s autobiography and the qualities of the assemblage of his black identity are complementary; the trajectory of Obama’s observations of himself, his relationships, and the racial systems they operate in are “open-ended” and “non-totalizing.” An agency exists here: by not being constrained to the production of conclusions, Obama’s narrative becomes an active mode of self-searching and interrogation of the interpersonal influences of black and white culture rather than a simple recounting of his life events. 

Obama’s narrative thus holds a unique position in the larger genre of black life narrative; an in-depth account of the difficulty of the multiracial experience within the context of black identity is underexplored and underwritten. Smith and Watson’s assertion that “agency is necessarily situated within and against social worlds” (Smith and Watson 99) supports this idea; the complexity of Obama’s life narrative, as well as his agency to self-define, lies in how he both dedicates himself to discovering his role in the “social world” of blackness while often situating himself “against” the qualities he observes. Obama’s autobiography, then, intervenes in dominant culture narratives by highlighting a unique layer of complexity within the black experience, and thus in black life writing, founded on the consideration of the black identity outside of its response to whiteness.  

Barack Obama’s groundbreaking autobiography, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, participates in a racial conversation whose thesis is that the black identity, and the bodies, experiences, and stories that create it, are not unfortunate symptoms of white history. Obama’s autobiographical exploration of his black identity evolves within the complex assemblage of himself, the differing models of blackness represented in his father and Ray, and the reflective structure of the narrative itself. Agency, then, emerges not through Obama’s performance as a primary agent in his own development, but through his participation in and confrontation of the complex assemblage of blackness in which he exists. The broader significance of his autobiography’s intention and structure reinforces a central truth: blackness is not white property in the sense that blackness, as exhibited through Obama’s wrestling with it, has always struggled with itself. Obama’s autobiography is evidentiary: its trajectory is not centered around navigating white oppression and racism but on a deeply personal interrogation of the black identity and the process of claiming and belonging to it.  

Works Cited 

Barack Obama. Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. Three Rivers Press, 2009. 

Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. 2nd ed., University Of Minnesota Press, 2010.