The Discourse of Creation and Re-creation of Names in Lawrence Jackson’s Autobiography My Father’s Name

This analysis suggests a linguistic reading of names as discourse through the autobiography of Lawrence Jackson, a descendant of slaves by his ancestors. The author describes various practices that consist in giving names to designate people; these names are all associated with the production of discourse. The name lends itself to an analysis of the discourse for which it gives the keys of analysis: such is the objective of this contribution. The naming discourse grounded in history causes the author to adopt a double posture in his autobiographical writing, that of reappropriating these names, in the first phase, in order to question them, in the second phase. This is why, the analysis resorts to the theory of Postmodernism, to the extent that the architecture of names inherited from history is equally put into question in ways of “de-historized” forms.