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Abstract
The Perimeter of Eden is an innovative graphic memoir that explores my family history and the ways in which it intertwines with American history. The book began as a response to an unpublished memoir written by my great-grandmother about growing up as a settler on Homestead Act land in Oklahoma. Reading her manuscript inspired me to dig deeper into family history; in doing so, I discovered fascinating resonances between the lives of women in previous generations and my own—including the conflict they experienced between the family’s strict Fundamentalist Christian attitudes and their own impulses toward self-expression. I also began to see my family’s story as inseparable from American history, particularly from the gendered and racialized narratives that underwrote colonization.
In the book, I combine the personal and political in an act of hybrid storytelling—utilizing personal narrative, excerpts from my great-grandmother’s text, interviews with my mother and grandmother, careful historical research, and insights gleaned from feminist theory, Critical Race Theory, and the work of various indigenous thinkers. The text also contains flights into fiction and mythlike passages in the voice of an ancient ancestor.