Barack Obama's memoir Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995) has been an enormous public success since it was re-issued in 2004. Obama's narrative is a powerfully crafted account of a personal quest that rhetorically transverses over geographical boundaries and literary genres. What interests me about this work is how it poetically plaits personal history with cultural myth, unbolting fact with imagination. Textually contiguous with other African American stories of self-representation and liberation, Dreams from My Father strikes me as a potent narrative of self-inscription. To put it in its simplest performative expression, the narrator of this book asks "who am I" and in doing so writes itself into place, not as an identity found but as the subject in writing.