Other, similar sites

Compare Colette Gaiter's article, "Space/Race" (from Bad Subjects, Issue # 33, September 1997) to WLAJFA. How are these two eerily similar stories different, both about young black women in foreign countries finding their identities, when one is mostly composed of text and one is mostly composed of pictures?

From this article: "I suppose it didn't occur to her that sometimes "good" behavior is not the required response."

Gaiter's article is much longer, more traditionally text-based, and more intellectual than Karasic's; however, she uses a similar format in comparing events in her own life (which is remarkably similar to Karasic's) with political events that are happening at the time. She also writes about what it is like to be a child of the military abroad, and what it was like during the 1960s:

"As a military child in a foreign country, I had to identify with being an American."

Gaiter also writes about the process of finding materials, and her thinking behind the process, which Karasic does not:

"I was at the National Archives finding materials to compare with my family photographs and memories of the 1960s. What I really wanted to know was what my life and experience had to do with the events and pictures that were in magazines and newspapers. I decided to start with the civil rights movement because it seemed so far removed from my day- to-day reality, but ultimately changed my life in ways I can only begin to comprehend in retrospect. By doing this research, I would be filling in the gaps in my own personal history."

Gaiter explores the connections between the civil rights movement and the Space race of the 1960s, attempting to tie in disparate historical occurences with her own personal history, which was not directly involved with either the civil rights movement or the space missions but affected by both. She writes about the cultural "mythology" that is built up around these events and how it affects those who lived through them.

Image from "Space/Race" by Colette Gaiter

Other Sites

Glass Houses is a project by Jacalyn Lopez Garcia exploring Mexican-American assimilation. She uses a similar combination of narrative and "family album" style photos, although in a different, more interactive interface. Here, too, you are getting a personal story with political questions interspersed.

"But in California, people would ask me "WHAT ARE YOU?" I guess because they didn't quite know how to ask "ARE YOU AMERICAN ?" I would proudly reply, "MEXICAN". It wasn't until I became a teenager that I claimed I was "Mexican-American". from Glass Houses

Beyondwriting.com has more examples of the genre of online autobiography than any other site I've seen. A useful resource for comparison. WLAJFA is listed here.

Alternative autobiographies: portraits in the 21st century is also interesting.