Malala Yousafzai: Fighting for Girls’ Rights via Collaboration and Co-construction

Abstract

Building on academic publications that have tried to assess Malala Yousafzai’s life-writing project in its entirety, this chapter presents each of her life-writing texts as an example of collaborative testimonial narrative. Moving away from an objective, neutral tone, her life writing tends to rely on emotional language and various other discursive strategies aimed at sustaining interest over time. Since Malala Yousafzai started her self-narration when she was 11, technology and traditional media have gone hand in hand. Her appropriation of the hashtag launched under her name proved vital in her reconstruction of an activist self. Yet, the presence of a co-author, either hinted at or made explicit, can be traced throughout all her life-writing texts, from her first blog to her last book on displacement.

This chapter builds on an original article first published as “Construction and Collaboration in Life-Writing Projects: Malala Yousafzai’s Activist ‘I’” (Martínez García 2019a) in the Journal of Writing in Creative Practice 12 (1–2): 201–217. It also features part of an original article first published as “Empathy for Social Justice: The Case of Malala Yousafzai” (Martínez García 2019c) in the Journal of English Studies 17: 253–275.