Finding the nomadic voice

This chapter studies a little-known sample of gypsy autobiography, edited and published in 1890, by Francis Wylde Carew, surgeon to a convict establishment in Moorport, where he encountered Samson Loveridge, a Romani inmate injured in a prison gang assault. The work is read as an early example of autoethnography, building upon Deborah E. Reed-Danahay’s observation that the genre may focus on auto (self), ethno (group), or graphy (the research and writing process) and is “a form of self-narrative, that places the self within a social context.” It examines the nomad’s self-conscious approach to life writing, the politics of editing, and the pastiche of life-narratives that characterize the versatility of Loveridge’s autobiographical act. It establishes how the nomadic subject’s preference for ludic indeterminacy demonstrates how rhetorical confinement within life writing as a genre constructed by sedentary society may be resisted.