Feminist Heteroglossia of Technology, Narratives, and Grass Wisdom Lucile Clifton's Generations: A Memoir (1976)

In Generations: A Memoir (1976), Lucille Clifton creates a dynamic heteroglossia, weaving multiple narratives and meanings from her family photographs, narratives, and Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself from Leaves of Grass (1881). Through this heteroglossia—an embodied form of photography—she cultivates an interdependent, non-hierarchical, and generative relationship between technology, culture, and nature. This study offers a new perspective on heteroglossia in Clifton’s life writing, highlighting her significant contributions to African American feminist conceptual photography and feminist visual objectivity in New Materialism. By doing so, it challenges and complicates racialized and anthropocentric representations of identity, culture, and nature in modern Western visual and representational technologies.