Autobiography and Changing Identities 27-30 July 2000 |
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Abstracts:
Timothy
Dow Adams Photography and Autobiography in Norma Cantú’s Canícula In this presentation I would like to discuss interrelations between photography and autobiography in Norma Elia Cantú’s Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood on La Frontera (1995), using the words and images in this text as one way of getting to the heart of the paradox inherent in the presence of photography within autobiography, as aptly described by Mary Price: "What is said about a photograph depends on what is perceived by the viewer, who must, according to the use intended for the photograph, resolve, explicate, or ignore the significant tension between ‘heightened by life’ and ‘paralyzed by fact.’" In Canícula Cantú uses photographs to present a significant reconstruction of her childhood self as a Chicana, living in both Mexico and the United States, by displacing her bicultural identity (Mexican in Mexico, Chicana in the United States) with a more fluid one, a life lived not in two separate cultures but on the border. Her sense of a borderland self is celebrated in a text that is itself on the border between fact and fiction, an autobiography made out of fiction, a book that contains photographs that both reveal and conceal.
Masha
Belenky Narrative of Remembrance, Narrative of Loss: The Silence of the Photographs in Georges Perec's W or The Memory of Childhood "I don't know if
I have nothing to say, I know that I am saying nothing; I don't know if
what I would have to say is not said because it is the unspeakable [l'indicible]
(the unspeakable is not hidden within writing, it is what had set it in
motion); I know that what I say is blank, is neutral, is a sign once and
for all of annihilation once and for all. "All photographs
are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another
person's mortality" Georges Perec's autobiography, W or Memory of Childhood (W ou le souvenir d'enfance, 1975), centers on the author's attempt to grapple with the death of his parents, who both perished in the Holocaust. Perec's autobiography is not so much an examination of the author's true self as it is an effort to remember and recreate images of his parents through writing. At the heart of Perec's autobiographical project are descriptions of several photographs of his parents. In fact, these photographs are a starting point for his writing: the examination of his parents' pictures propels him to write his childhood memoirs. The photographs, he hopes, will help him solve the problem he posits in the very beginning of the book which opens with a paradoxical sentence for a childhood memoir: "I don't have childhood memories." Looking at his parents' photographs and writing about them becomes the only way to recapture a past long gone and images of lost ones. Interestingly, these photographs are not included in W. Rather, they are transformed into the text, described in painstaking detail. But do these photographs 'speak'? Do they succeed in conjuring up images of lost ones? My paper will demonstrate how Perec's photographic descriptions fail in their mnemonic function: the narrator's scrutiny does not make the photographs 'speak'. Just as for him the detailed examination of images does not bring back memories of his parents, so too for the reader the textualization of photographs does not satisfy our desire for the "story." This silence, however, becomes a productive way to express the irreversible loss. Emblematic of Perec's autobiographic project as a whole, the photographic descriptions become markers of silence, a space where absence, silence, and loss are irrevocably inscribed. Yet although the parents' photographic images remain silent for both the narrator and the reader, their silence itself becomes a poetic monument to the memory of the dead and a site of textual meaning.
Lynn Z.
Bloom Bodies of Evidence: Academic Lives as Academic Arguments This paper demonstrates that contemporary American academic autobiographers use their lives as bodies of evidence for academic arguments, telling the stories of their lives to illustrate the theories that have sustained their research and teaching. English professors are particularly fitting subjects for this study because as autobiographers they make significant use of the personal to explain the theoretical, rendering the abstract into the concrete particulars of their lives. This paper briefly addresses the autobiographies of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Colored People: A Memoir (1994), signifying the significant strength of family and community; Alvin Kernan's In Plato's Cave (1999), a New Critical lamentation for the passing of "the old academic order"; Marianna De Marco Torgovnick's Crossing Ocean Parkway: Readings by an Italian-American Daughter (1994)--an application of Gone Primitive ("about 'primitive' Others as they figure within Western obsessions [and her own] identification with the 'Other'"); and Edward Said's Out of Place (1999), exemplifying the problems of post-colonialism that follow invariably from Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism: "With so many dissonances in my life I have learned actually to prefer being not quite right and out of place" (295). Then the paper concentrates on an analysis of Mike Rose's Lives on the Boundary (1989), a mixture of populist humanism and self-actualizing educational psychology, and Jane Tompkins's A Life in School: What the Teacher Learned (1996), which combines feminist theory with Freire's liberatory pedagogy. Focusing on their lives in school, first as students, then as teachers, these authors demonstrate the evolution, application, and efficacy of their pedagogical theories in actual classrooms.
William
Boelhower Shifting Forms of Sovereignty: Immigrant and Ethnic Autobiographies in the Literature of the United States The purpose of my paper is to give another look at the essentially different forms of representation that immigrant and ethnic autobiographers invest in as they seek to win some kind of closure in their texts. The possibilities of closure are closely linked with the issue of political sovereignty (citizenship) and with the broader context of the choice of a shifting form of the notion of economy (wealth and well-being). I will use this reading hypothesis to return to a number of classical immigrant autobiographies and then see how they differ from a number of classical ethnic autobiographies.
Suzanne
L. Bunkers An Autocritical Conversation: Reception, Transgressive Writing, Radical Introspection, and the Practice of Writing 'Home.' (with Helen Buss and Brenda Daly) In keeping with the conference theme, "Autobiography and Changing Identities," our session will focus on autobiographical processes that involve significant displacement or reconstruction of "self." Because all three of us theorize, teach, and write forms of autobiography, our "autocritical" exchange, based on a three-way e-mailed conversation over several months, will take up the ways in which the reception of our autobiographical texts has shaped our own practice as critics and as teachers. In bringing our critical practice to the consideration of our own writing, we begin to contemplate the nature of transgressive writing, to understand how a concept of radical introspection can be used in teaching autobiographical texts, and to realize how each of us has been motivated by a concept of "home" as a writing practice.
Helen
Buss An Autocritical Conversation: Reception, Transgressive Writing, Radical Introspection, and the Practice of Writing 'Home.' (with Suzanne Bunkers and Brenda Daly) In keeping with the conference theme, "Autobiography and Changing Identities," our session will focus on autobiographical processes that involve significant displacement or reconstruction of "self." Because all three of us theorize, teach, and write forms of autobiography, our "autocritical" exchange, based on a three-way e-mailed conversation over several months, will take up the ways in which the reception of our autobiographical texts has shaped our own practice as critics and as teachers. In bringing our critical practice to the consideration of our own writing, we begin to contemplate the nature of transgressive writing, to understand how a concept of radical introspection can be used in teaching autobiographical texts, and to realize how each of us has been motivated by a concept of "home" as a writing practice.
Keith
Byerman (Re)-Centering the Self: Marginality, Nationality, and Identity in The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois Throughout his career as a scholar and political activist, W.E.B. Du Bois moved from center to margin and back again in his pursuit of racial justice and ideological principle. This self-marginalization was consistently marked by the argument that he was in fact not moving at all, but was merely sustaining the core values of the group that others were compromising. He also defined his position as central to the idea and ideal of the nation that were being corrupted by the seductions of materialism, status, and political advantage. His last autobiography, written at the time (1958-1959) he was deciding to formally join the CPUSA and to give up his American citizenship, develops a dialectic of margin and center that reveals the complexities of subjectivity and positionality in a racialized and McCarthyist American society. This paper seeks to suggest the ways that Du Bois undertakes to demonstrate his centrality in American history at the point at which the nation had rejected his views and at which he was publicly acting to repudiate the nation. Du Bois produces a text that is post-modern in practice while being pre-modern in theory. He represents a self that is whole and a trope for the nation itself, while his discourse and recreated experiences suggest fragmentation. He seeks to construct a presence at the very site where he is an absence and an image of the nation that he himself no longer believes.
Andrew Cantrell Somatic Suffering, Social Upheaval, and Self-Fashioning in
17th Century English Women's Autobiographical Writing Lynn
A. Casmier-Paz Naming: The Problem--Slave Narratives and the Subject of Autobiography During the era of New World Slavery, the genre of slave autobiography, or "slave narrative" became a strategic discourse where the mediation of print was effaced to produce the violence and brutality of slave culture. However, the tortured slave's identity and experience could never be fully realized in slave narratives in part because the protocols of autobiography, e.g., Phillipe Lejeune's "autobiographical pact," were always subject to manipulation since slaves, by definition, were inaccessible to contractual obligations of any kind. Moreover, the black slaves' ontological status was the condition for their erasure as subjects. Slaves were defined, in part, by their status outside the Brotherhood of Man. Therefore we find that, in slave narratives, all promises are made to be broken. Yet the narratives labor rhetorically to produce a slave subject--for decidedly political ends--through scenes of violence and exploitation. It is through the re-presentation of violence and the slave body that slave narratives hope to yield the brutalized slave subject: Slave narratives attempt to signal marks upon the slave body as signs of a racialized identity. This study examines the extent to which slave narratives, as racialized texts, complicate the genre of "autobiography." I propose that slave narratives can only produce one of the earliest and most complex post-modern autobiographical subjects if our current understanding regarding the protocols of the proper name, the functions of representation, and the opaque, mediated relation of writing to experience are revised.
Mary
Jean Corbett Performing Identities: Actresses, Suffrage, Autobiography This paper will consider the relationships among politics, performance, and personae in self-representations by some late-Victorian and Edwardian actresses who were active in the suffrage movement at the turn of the century. Situating autobiographical texts by Elizabeth Robins, Lena Ashwell, and Cicely Hamilton, among others, within the performative spaces of stage and street, I hope to show how these actresses rhetorically constitute new conceptions of identity, shaped by emergent feminist norms for theatrical and political involvement, that contest male-dominant institutional structures. One strand of my analysis will consider how memoirs by activist-actresses refuse the model of interiority that Elin Diamond has identified as a hallmark of bourgeois theatrical realism; these texts do not represent an introspective or melodramatic subject in the mold of a heroine from Ibsen or Pinero or Shaw, even if these are the sort of theatrical parts their authors predominantly performed. Rather, in their resistance to this rhetorical and performative model for the "new woman," actress-activists relentlessly challenge the parameters that would have constrained them to represent only "the drama of consciousness." Following Judith Butler, I want to consider self-representation as a "performance which is performative": in this light I regard the emphasis within these memoirs on struggles against institutional barriers to public or political self-representation as continuous with, even constitutive of, the rhetorical tactics their authors undertake in writing their lives as public documents rather than private dramas.
G.
Thomas Couser Genre and Genome: DNA and Life Writing "The Holy Grail," "the Code of Codes," "the Book of Life," "the Book of Man"--the human genome is often referred to in terms more appropriate for texts, even sacred texts, than for the tiny strips of DNA of which it actually consists. As these phrases suggest, the genome has become a contemporary icon to which many people look for the unraveling of the mysteries of life and for the solution to many human problems. Much has been written on the social and ethical implications of genomic research, but little has been written on its implications for life writing. Insofar as DNA is thought to be an index of identity--indeed, the only unique and stable signifier of the self--and even a predictor (or pre-scriber) of life course, the decoding of the human genome will inevitably have significant impact on the way in which people imagine themselves and write their lives (and those of others). My paper will speculate about the effect of genome research on life writing generally and on particular subgenres, from diary and confession to memoir and biography. I wish to explore various ways in which life writing may both register and resist the implicit cultural logic of DNA research. Alice Wexler's Mapping Fate: A Memoir of Family, Risk, and Genetic Research will serve as a case in point insofar as it deals with her struggle to understand the role of Huntington's disease in shaping her family history and her identity.
Brenda
Daly An Autocritical Conversation: Reception, Transgressive Writing, Radical Introspection, and the Practice of Writing 'Home.' (with Suzanne Bunkers and Helen Buss) In keeping with the conference theme, "Autobiography and Changing Identities," our session will focus on autobiographical processes that involve significant displacement or reconstruction of "self." Because all three of us theorize, teach, and write forms of autobiography, our "autocritical" exchange, based on a three-way e-mailed conversation over several months, will take up the ways in which the reception of our autobiographical texts has shaped our own practice as critics and as teachers. In bringing our critical practice to the consideration of our own writing, we begin to contemplate the nature of transgressive writing, to understand how a concept of radical introspection can be used in teaching autobiographical texts, and to realize how each of us has been motivated by a concept of "home" as a writing practice.
Jill
R. Deans Finding Christa and Reno Finds Her Mom: In and Against Adoption Autobiography My research examines two autobiographical documentary films as part of a recent swell of personal narratives written around the topic of adoption in the late twentieth century. Since Florence Fisher’s 1973 memoir, The Search for Anna Fisher, adoption activists like adoptee Betty Jean Lifton and birth mother Carol Schaefer have shared stories of search and reuinion. Though they sometimes express different ideologies, these autobiographies chart a growing discontent with adoption practices and policies in the U.S. Moreover, they provide an opportunity for a broader examination of the cultural forces that valorize the biogenetic nuclear family. Within this trend, Camille Bilops’ 1991 documentary film, Finding Christa, challenges kinship ideals through its portrayal of Billops’ reunion with her adult birth daughter (relinquished as an infant). Billops sees the reunion more as an occasion for making art than as an opportunity to rebuild family ties. Meanwhile, Christa expresses a longing to connect, to get closer, not only as a daughter, but as an up-and-coming singer, an artist in her own right. As a feminist fimmaker Billops successfully claims her own story, but tempers her triumph by repositioning the camera’s objectifying gaze on her daughter. Karen Reno’s 1998 film, Reno Finds Her Mom, on the other hand, reveals a comedian struggling to locate the origins of her powerfully funny voice. No one is more shocked than Reno, a consummate New Yorker, to discover those origins in a quiet suburban California neighborhood. Reno’s journey leads her to reconcile her lack of control in the discovery of herself. Together these films express a tension within many adoption autobiographies between the desire to create an identity and the drive to locate an "authentic" self.
Martine
Delvaux Kissing, Seeing, Telling: Kathryn Harrison's Story of Incest This paper deals with the construction of the autobiographical self through a tale of incest in Kathryn Harrison's memoir The Kiss. I will look at how this daughter, whose father left when she was a child and who later returned and entertained sexual relations with her, becomes an agent through the writing of her incest narrative. Although in fact a legitimate daughter, Harrison's tale describes being abandoned by her father, and in some sense being illegitimated. It is my contention that her incestuous relationship with the "prodigal" father who returns as a lover, and the subsequent act of transcription of this experience, are part of an act of re-legitimation. Harrison eventually rejects her father's law, his sexuality, his phallus, her eyes opening themselves painfully to an impossible reparation, to the impossibility of there ever being a father. And this impossibility, this ultimate rejection of the name-of-the-father results in the writing of the name of the daughter. Two moments, which echo each other in this narrative, emblematize the evolution of the autobiographical subject. First, the initial kiss gives birth to the incestuous relationship and serves as the enforcement of the father's law. Second, the birth of the author is shaped by means of a "birth story" which serves to undo the father-daughter relationship: Harrison's tale of how she opened newborn kittens' eyes (and caused them to become infected), she who only exists for her father when he "sees" her. Here, the daughter comes to reject a "child", a child who represents her. In doing so, she refuses her role as the daughter of an absent father.
John
Eakin Breaking Rules: The Consequences of Self-Narration This paper investigates the rules of autobiographical discourse and their consequences. It assumes that self-narration is a rule-governed discourse, embedded in a constraining social and cultural environment despite its attendant myth of self-determination. What are the prerequisites in our culture for being a person, for having and telling a life story? To link person and story in this way is to hypothesize that the rules for identity narrative function simultaneously as rules for identity. If narrative is indeed an identity content, then the regulation of narrative carries the possibility of the regulation of identity--a disquieting proposition to contemplate in the context of our culture of individualism. Because the rules for self-narration are tacit, because the daily performance of identity story is instinctive and automatic, it is chiefly when these rules are perceived to have been broken that they are most clearly displayed and articulated. This paper identifies three primary transgressions-- there may be more--for which self-narrators have been called to account: (1) misrepresentation of biographical and historical truth; (2) infringement of the individual's right to privacy; and (3) failures to display normative models of personhood. The gravity of these charges for those accused is registered in the consequences that result from the alleged violations: public condemnation, litigation, and (potentially) institutional confinement. Preliminary work suggests that the deep subject behind these rules is ethics.
Bina
Toledo Freiwald Becoming and Be/longing: Kate Bornstein's Gender Outlaw and My Gender Workbook American writer, actor, writer and transsexual activist Kate Bornstein’s explorations of the tangled webs of identity, desire, and belonging resonate with other contemporary narratives similarly concerned with bodies and identities marked by the bar(s) that render be(ing)/longing a particularly fraught and difficult negotiation. These narratives remind us that while belonging is never more than a longing, such longings to belong so that one may be are constitutive of the experience of subjecthood itself. The paper offers a reading of Bornstein’s autobiographical collage Gender Outlaw: Of Men, Women, and the Rest of Us (1994) and what I regard as its companion volume, My Gender Workbook (1998), as narratives that seek not only to interrogate the dominant identity grids of gender and sexuality, but also, and perhaps most importantly, to enact a becoming, to effect a different kind of being and belonging. Writing in Gender
Outlaw as a male-to-female "transsexual lesbian whose female
lover is becoming a man," Bornstein sets out to fashion an identity
for herself in a work that been described as the first postmodern
transsexual (and thus posttranssexual) autobiography. What I am
particularly interested in, however, are the ways in which Bornstein's
text, while flaunting and advocating gender fluidity, is also profoundly
concerned with establishing those (however shifting) relations of
belonging that seem necessary for the material, epistemic, affective, and
social survival of the self. My examination of Gender Outlaw will
foreground the two axes along which becoming can be seen as a function of
an enacted relation: a relation to oneself (to one’s changed/changing
body and its history), and a relation to and with others (the search for
community). In My Gender Workbook, moreover, Bornstein extends the
project of making the self ready for the future by seeking to make the
future ready for the self – to make a future in which the self can
belong – by inviting the reader to complete the autobiographical act and
ask, in turn, ‘Who would I like to become?'
Leigh
Gilmore Limit-Cases, Trauma, and Self-Representation Sherrill E. Grace The Magnetic North of Self: Autobiography by Mina Benson Hubbard and Gontran de Poncins When Mina Benson Hubbard set out across Labrador in 1905, she thought she was completing her dead husband's work. Instead she mapped hitherto uncharted territory within herself, as much as the "unknown Labrador." When Gontran de Poncins decided to spend a year, 1938-39, with the Inuit of King William Island, he thought he would discover a "primitive" people, but he uncovered the primitive in himself. Both A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador (1908) and Kabloona (1941) chart remarkable journeys into Arctic and sub-Arctic terra incognita, and both have been read as providing ethnographic and cartographic "truth" about the indigenous peoples and northern Canada. In this paper, however, I will analyse what characterizes these hybrid narratives of northern exploration and critique their different constructions of ethnographic truth and autobiographical authority. After briefly situating both texts within the context of exploration narrative, in which the dominant tradition is raced, classed, and categorically gendered (white, mid- to upper-middle class, and masculine), I will examine the shifting position of the white "I," or subject, vis à vis the representation (in language and photography) of the indigenous "other" in order to demonstrate the ways in which these heavily elegiac narratives are about the narrator, not about the objective truth. True to the generic conventions of exploration narrative, both texts include maps and photographs/illustrations; therefore, this documentary evidence will be evaluated as a supplementary strategy for representation and objectification of the other, while paradoxically serving to decentre and destabilize the identity of the white narrator. Like Magnetic North, the selves created in and through these texts resist location and inhabitation. As time allows, I would like to conclude by suggesting some of the ways in which these two texts have shaped (or not) the conventions of similar narratives in the 20th century and why.
Sneja
Gunew Technologies of the Self: Corporeal Affects of English The Lacanian linguistic turn in psychoanalysis has focussed attention on the psychic and corporeal effects of language. But the universalizing impulse of psychoanalysis made it difficult to analyse the affect of specific languages. In postcolonial debates English as a force undermining the linguistic and cultural diversity of the world has functioned as a given. At the same time it is clear that English itself has been changed completely by the various 'englishes' proliferating around the world, whether these be part of the ex-Empire and harnessed to a program of education, or not. Not examined as closely are the details of what it means, corporeally, viscerally, to speak these englishes while one is at the same time encouraged to pursue English (in its received standard form) and to describe these effects in literature. How, more precisely, does English/english write on the body before it is written in texts? How might we perceive this process as a technology of subjectivity and a disciplining of bodies in quite specific material ways? What might the experience of English, the affect of English, mean to those caught up in the legacies of the imperial process, subjected to the abrasive grain of English on a colonized body which had been structured by another language? This in turn produced the array of 'dialects, creoles and pidgins' which have more recently and respectfully been resurfacing as 'varieties' of English. Learning to speak English choreographed bodies in certain ways. The paper examines three memoirs written by subjects outside Britain who experienced their learning of English in tandem with exposure to English Literature: Edward Said, in Egypt and Palestine and then the United States; Shirley Geok-lin Lim in Malaysia and then the United States; and Eva Hoffman in Poland, then Canada and the United States. All three subjects endure ambivalent responses to this experience which comprises a rebelliousness against the ideological impulse behind the induction into English at the same time that they are seduced by the aesthetic power of both the language and the texts it has produced. All three express the psychic and the physical effects/affects of this exposure to a foreign body of language and writing. The distinction between (received standard) English and its variants as 'english' is a suggestion put forward in The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffith and Helen Tiffin (London, 1989).
Barbara
Havercroft Trauma, Agency and Identity in Annie Ernaux's La Honte (Shame, 1997) The contemporary French writer Annie Ernaux has produced an entire oeuvre of autobiographical texts, all of which pertain to the construction of the female autobiographical subject, and all of which play to the borderlines between several generic forms (the autobiographical novel, biography, autobiography, autofiction, and diary). Ernaux's most recent text, La Honte (Shame, 1997), focuses on a traumatic incident of her youth--her father's attempted murder of her mother (in June 1952)--and explains how this one dramatic event has been the source of a number of crippling emotions (fear, anxiety, shame) and psychological scars that have plagued her ever since. My paper will examine the relationship between the autobiographical writing of the traumatic event and the formation of the female narrating subject's identity, as well as the connections between life writing and feminist agency that are at work in this text. Using feminist criticism of autobiography (Smith, Watson, etc.), as well as recent feminist theories of agency (Butler, Mann, etc.) I will demonstrate how Ernaux deploys specific narrative strategies (such as repetition and quotation, metatextual discourse on the writing of trauma and shame, and descriptions of "material" evidence) to construct an autobiographical subject that becomes endowed with agency through writing. If all of Ernaux's texts are marked by her multiple attempts to "speak women's lived reality" (in the words of Philippe Vilain), La Honte shows that in overcoming the shame of writing about shame itself, in facing the originary scars of the traumatic event, the autobiographical subject is able to cope with these debilitating wounds and move beyond them.
Peaches Marion Henry ‘When the Voiceless Begin to Find a Voice': Truth, Authority, and Power in Minority Autobiography Using the situation of David Stoll's recent challenge (I, Rigoberta Menchu and The Story of All Guatemalans) to Rigoberta Menchu's autobiography, this paper revisits the issues of truth, authority, authenticity, and power in autobiography. This paper argues that autobiographies by people of marginalized status which challenge hegemonic socio- or geopolitical institutions, such as Menchu's does, are forced to adhere to a standard of literal truth not required of authors deemed to be part of the dominant culture[s], which raises questions about authority and power.
Leah
D. Hewitt Private and Collective Autobiography: New Wave Filmmakers and World War II This presentation explores the relationship between private and collective autobiographies in the work of New Wave filmmakers, Louis Malle, François Truffaut, and Claude Chabrol. I argue that the "inherited war" of their parents, World War II, returns in these filmmakers’ works as a cinematic writing of a repressed past, one that informs their artistic choices and implicitly explores the relationship between New Wave art ("Right Bank style"), a certain conception of the artistic self, and political commitment. Malle’s Lacombe Lucien and Goodbye, Children, Truffaut’s The Last Metro, and Chabrol’s Story of Women, are all at once attempts to come to terms with the specifics of the filmmakers’ childhoods during the Occupation, mirrors of the French collective response to (and reworking of) wartime memories, and finally, an articulation of what it means to be French in the postwar era. Although these films may not be autobiographies in a narrow sense, they do present personal or "signed" responses (in accordance with "auteur" film theory) to the lived experience of a period that has initiated many of the debates concerning French nationhood in the last half of the 20th century. It is at the juncture of autobiography and film that these artists reveal an acute vision of the French "imaginaire social" at war with itself.
Joseph
Hogan Intersecting Cultures, Interstitial Selves: Creating Cross-Cultural Identity Examining a number of different memoirs and autobiographies where the subject moves from one culture to another or lives in the colonial/post-colonial realm of conflicting cultural discourses and thus exists in a number of often conflicting and incommensurable interpellating discourses, we will explore what may be termed the interstitial self—the self that emerges in the interstices of these various discourses. Sometimes this self emerges only for a moment to deal with and negotiate conflicts—the subject is often unaware of this shift—before being drawn back into a more stable subject position. At other times, it is grasped as a way to escape the restrictive discourses of each of the conflicting cultures. The notion of the interstitial self can be fruitfully contrasted to the hybrid self (see Homi Bhabha, and also see Susan Stanford Friedman's recent mapping of the kinds of hybridity). The limitation of the metaphor of hybridity is that it implies an organic mixture that cannot be separated whereas the interstitial self is based on a more "separable" model of the subject. Such a subject can be seen as shifting among positions and discourses, sometimes combining them into a true hybrid, at other times not recognizing the contradictions and maintaining them as separate and independent discourses of the self.
Richard
Ingram Taking the Fast Trip to Squirrel City: Women Writing Manic Depression In this paper I discuss three books by women who have at some point in their lives been diagnosed as having 'bipolar disorder,' a condition more commonly referred to as 'manic depression.' My aim is to bring out the ways that these texts-- Kate Millett's The Loony Bin Trip (1990), Elizabeth Wurtzel's Prozac Nation (1994), and Kay Redfield Jamison's An Unquiet Mind (1995)-- challenge the psychopharmaceutical confinement of this disorder to events within the brain, and shift attention to interpersonal relations, and relations with social institutions and structures. This analysis involves exploration of the processes of construction and deconstruction of gender identity before and after the statement of a psychiatric diagnosis. It entails a critique of Michel Foucault's dualism of daily experience and experience of/at the limit, which reiterates a stereotypically masculine desire to flirt with death in an attempt to escape the everyday. The autobiographies of Millett, Wurtzel, and Jamison all challenge this dualism by showing how the everyday opens out towards the extreme, and how the impossible becomes folded within daily existence. With their focus on the relationality of madness within social scenes, I argue that these women write manic depression in ways that strongly contest liberal psychiatry's exclusive focus on the 'individual,' and that they each work to undermine the stigma resulting from ongoing efforts to quarantine madness in brains said to be flawed.
Julie LeBlanc The Construction of the Autobiographical Subject: From Textual Genetics to Feminist Poetics The main focus of my paper is to study the textual and discursive strategies by which the autobiographical subject is constructed in Brossards autobiographical narratives as well as in some of the manuscripts of these texts: Journal ou voilà donc un manuscrit (1984), She would be the first sentence of my next novel/Elle serait la première phrase de mon prochain roman (1998), "Nicole Brossard" Autobiography (1991). Through the study of the "avant-textes" of some of Brossards autobiographical narratives one arrives at a clearer understanding of the construction of narrative content and formal structures, the ideological and social implications of the act of writing, the rhetorical properties and generic configurations of the textual voice, the strategies of displacement and appropriation in the reconstruction of the authorial subject. What is quite spectacular in Brossard's autobiographical narratives is the importance which is given to the phenomenon of intertextuality, to the dialogic configuration of narrative (as opposed to the monologic dimension of the diary), to the figure of the Other ("figure de l'altérité"). One notices the significant presence of other narratives in the construction of the authorial voice. From this perspective there appears to be an important reconstruction of the autobiographical subject through the (temporary) displacement of the self and the appropriation of various figures of alterity. In Brossard's autobiographical narratives, alterity does not only manifest itself through the resurrection of other voices, of different voices, of lost voices, of other female voices, or through the use of various intertexts, but also through a critical representation of dominant social powers and authoritative institutions and ideologies (namely the Roman Catholic Church, traditional patriarcal sources of subversion, etc.).
Rick H. Lee The Living End and the Faith of Loss: Gay Male Self- Representation in the Age of AIDS The AIDS epidemic has transformed the way gay men negotiate their subjectivities in relation to desire, risk, and mourning. The health crisis forced gay men to confront the trajectory of the individual life course as a "living end" and, additionally, to accept the perverse consolation that a "faith of loss" represented the only certainty for the present and for the often unrealizable future. In the significant body of AIDS literature, tropes of haunting and of the return of the dead recurrently appear. In this paper, I consider the recurrence of the supernatural and the miraculous across a range of AIDS narratives, arguing that they function to imagine alternative narrative termporalities that enable gay male authors and their auidences to deal with the issue of death and the work of mourning. The interruption of narrative time signals a desperate need to reorganize normative principles structuring the individual life course. Similarly, the postponement of narrative closure gestures toward a futurity that counters the social experience and material reality of AIDS. Whether autobiographical or fictional, all of the texts I consider significantly do more than just tell individual life stories. Ultimately, they are also stories about narrative and the pressures AIDS exerts on the telling of gay male life stories.
Philippe
Lejeune How Diaries End The end of diaries usually goes unnoticed, and thus unstudied, mainly for two reasons. First it is hardly ever marked in the text (diaries with a clausula are a rarity) and second the end may also mean that the text no longer exists, as destroying one’s diary on re-reading it is a frequent occurence. The confused meaning of « the end » stands in the way of reflection. To disentangle this, I selected sixteen diaries, both by recognized writers and ordinary people, in which the end clearly appeared, and analysed them along three lines : - the end as expectation : I tried to show that, contrary to autobiography, the diary is an experience of writing without end or rather writing against the end ; - the end in its relationship to the purpose – or more accurately the four purposes of a diary (expression, reflection, memory, creation) for each of which the idea of « the end » is completely different ; - the end as a reality : as a confrontation with its author’s death (whether suffered or sought), sometimes in fierce struggle (phantasm of having the last word) sometimes in acceptance of a forgone conclusion (death agony diaries, suicide diaries). These speculations are no doubt prompted by the chimerical desire to find a form of writing that establishes a balance between the vertigo of the origin, which autobiography confronts, and the vertigo of the end, which the diary attempts to exorcise.
Antje
Lindenmeyer ‘I am Prince Jussuf’: Else Lasker-Schüler’s Autobiographical Performance In my paper, I want to explore the complex autobiographical self (or selves) created by the German-Jewish poet Else Lasker-Schüler (1869-1945). Else Lasker-Schüler, in her poems and prose texts, develops a male autobiographical I, "Prince Jussuf of Thebes," who is situated in a phantastic Orient. This serves to blur the boundaries betwen "life" and "work," "fact" and "fiction": "Prince Jussuf's" phantastic biography becomes more real than "real" life could ever be. The phantastic self and the world that sustains "him" is created through performance: in poetry readings (where Else Lasker-Schüler appears as "Prince Jussuf" in a velvet jacket and flowing trousers), in the illustrations she draws for her books, in private letters signed "Jussuf," and in the frequent "I am Jussuf"invocations in her poems. I will focus, on the one hand, on the autobiographical performance as a play with gender and on the ways in which body and text (or image) become fused, to the extent that the body becomes the ground for the performance and its undoing. On the other hand, I will look at "Prince Jussuf" as means of claiming Jewish roots: Jussuf is, at times, identical with the biblical Joseph, the poet and dreamer betrayed by his brothers and forced into exile (and this identification becomes more important once Else Lasker-Schüler goes into exile herself.) However, Jussuf/Joseph hovers between a Jewish and an "Arabic" identification and is shot through with conflict; an autobiographical self that is, literally, split at the root.
Françoise
Lionnet 'She breastfed reluctance into me': Hunger Artists in the Global Economy This paper deals with a fictional testimonial narrative about the life of a female factory worker in the export-processing zones of a small developing country, Mauritius. The narrator, a Hindu woman, has become anorexic as a result of her stressful life in the factory. I show how the narrator begins to develop her own explanatory models for this dis-ease, that she articulates her refusal of food as a consequence of her internalization of foreign ideas of beauty (dieting), of Hindu religious beliefs about purity (fasting), and finally, as a reaction to the global economy and rampant consumerism (refusal to consume). I argue that this literary text is an important contribution to international perspectives on the question of women and development practices in various parts of the world.
Joel
Martineau Bill Reid, Autoethnography, and Conflict Bill Reid’s writing,
political stances, and sculptures have brought international, national,
and intra-national attention to Canada, British Columbia, and Haida Gwaii.
Reid (1920-1998) is best known for his sculptures, including The Raven
and the First Men at the UBC Museum of Anthropology, The Spirit of
Haida Gwaii at the Canadian Chancery in Washington, The Jade Canoe
in the departure lounge at Vancouver International Airport, and Lootas,
the cedar canoe housed at Skidegate. He was also an eloquent writer and
orator who pleaded for a halt to destructive forestry practices and
refused to complete The Spirit of Haida Gwaii until the federal and
provincial governments agreed to address Native land claims. His art and
his actions became powerful interventions in Haida and Canadian politics
and culture.
Jacqueline McLean Accessing Deep Memory: The Life and Art of Israeli Artist Mira
Susannah
B. Mintz Self-Writing and the Disabled Female Body Claiming the convergence of body and cultural narrative as sources of identity, Nancy Mairs and Lucy Grealy share the concerns of both feminist autobiography theory and disability studies. Both authors contest the generic conventions of traditional, male self-writing, as well as the underlying ideology of stable, disembodied selfhood out of which those conventions arise. But they also refuse the normative ideals of an "ablist" culture that reads their bodies as "freakish" and other. By bringing the female, "crippled" self into the domain of both men and "normally" embodied women alike, by demanding that readers confront both the ordinariness and the radical difference of their bodies, Mairs and Grealy are thus multiply subversive writers. Their accounts of embodied selfhood exemplify what Elizabeth Grosz has demanded of feminist theorizing about the relationship between body and self--new metaphors that map out a corporeal subjectivity, a psychical body. As feminist, disabled "manifestos," Grealy's Autobiography of a Face and Mairs's collections of personal essays estrange their readers from any easy certainty about disability, but they also invite new identifications that strive to dismantle their constructedness as "other."
Shirley Neuman Landscape, Memory, Autobiography
In When the Grass Was Taller, Richard Coe remarks that there are
some landscapes that do not fit his model of the "intimate"
spaces of childhood described in autobiography—he cites the Russian
steppes and the Canadian prairies. "Landscape, memory,
autobiography" looks at representations of such immense landscapes in
autobiographies of childhood and adolescence. Focussing on landscapes
which remain closer to the "natural" than do most of those that
figure in autobiography, and drawing on the geographical literature about
"landscape," the paper has three movements: 1) a brief
introduction, by way of the landscape of the author’s childhood, to the
links between the "natural" and the "constructed" in
landscape and between landscape, memory, and the imaging of a national
identity in a "settler culture"; 2) a brief discussion of some
autobiographical evocations of immense landscapes (including Conway’s The
Road from Coorain and Gabrielle Roy’s Sorrow and Enchantment);
3) a discussion of the ways in which these representations signify
mourning—including mourning for the loss of nation. Rebels and Traitors: Family in Women's Autobiography of the American South This paper explores how three contemporary white lesbian writers from the American South represent the significance of their place of origin in autobiography. Conservative journalist Florence King (1936- ), liberal novelist Blanche McCrary Boyd (1945 - ), and civil rights activist and essayist Mab Segrest (1949 - ) view their lives through the close association of region and family, against both of which they rebel and turn traitor while remaining deeply invested in both. In these autobiographies, being a Southern woman has everything to do with race and class, little to do with being a lesbian, though sexual orientation inflects and influences their views of themselves as rebels and traitors. Irony and displacement undercut the sentimentality and romanticism often associated with the American South. All three share a deep concern for family and, to some degree, Boyd's claim in The Redneck Way of Knowledge (1982): "nothing I wanted, nothing about me, mattered as much as the family did. . . . If I chose to leave, it was a condemned decision. I was expendable, of course, but a traitor" (6). Segrest foregrounds treachery in her title, Memoir of a Race Traitor (1994), weaving through her narrative of civil rights activism in North Carolina an exploration of her family and of growing up in Tuskegee, Alabama. Florence King's title Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady (1985) humorously alludes to the sense of estrangement these writers share in representing lives constructed almost entirely in terms of region.
Jeanne
Perreault "Only a white man": John Louis Spivak and Georgia Chain Gang In 1932, John Louis Spivak, a well-known leftist journalist from New York, published a novel he called Georgia Nigger. It tells the story of a young Black man caught in the Georgia prison-farm chain-gang system. Spivak buttressed his novel with photographs of chain-gang convicts he had taken while travelling in Georgia. This novel caused such repercussion and finally reform that it was compared in its time to Uncle Tom’s Cabin in its social impact. Later Spivak published his autobiography (A Man in His Time, 1967) in which he outlines the experience of gaining entry into the highly secret world of the Georgia prison system. His files, including stolen forms outlining punishments, prison foods, convicts’ letters, and his whole file of photographs, are at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, U. of Texas, Austin, where I recently examined them. I will trace the narrative from document (including photographs and music) to novel, to social impact to autobiography. My central questions will raise the issues of social identity and social change: Langston Hughes observed that only a white man could have done what Spivak did. Ultimately my paper will raise the problem of "speaking for" that has become such a fraught issue in recent years and has, perhaps, fueled some of the passion for autobiography—reading and writing it. That is, I wonder whether the much emphasized risk of breaking silence about one’s self is at this time in this place much less a risk than breaking it about someone else.
Linda
Peterson Family Memoirs: The Autobiography of Mary Howitt as Collaborative Life Writing In 1884 the writer Mary Howitt and her daughter Margaret, also a writer, began to assemble family letters and journals in order to compose what would eventually be published as Mary Howitt's Autobiography. They were joined in 1885 by Anna Mary Howitt, another daughter and a professional artist, who brought along sketches of the family's past homes and drew new sketches of "Marienruhe," the Howitt's place of retirement in Switzerland. Together, mother and daughters wrote the Autobiography of Mary Howitt, a verbal and visual memoir of the Botham and Howitt families with Mary as the central consciousness. In theorizing autobiography and its literary history, it is often said that 19th-century autobiography celebrates individual achievement and narrates individual progress, whether in the "high" art of Wordsworth's "The Prelude" or in the popular auto/biographies of Samuel Smiles's Self Help. The collaborative life writing of women like the Howitts suggests an equally strong, if less well known, 19th-century tradition of autobiography that emerges from a communal consciousness and shares a common ideology of work. My paper will explore this alternate tradition and the ideology of collaborative work from which it emerges.
Sarah
Phillips Casteel Canada as the Site of Exile and Traumatic Memory in Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation Eva Hoffman's autobiography Lost in Translation has garnered attention and praise for its nuanced exploration of the difficulties faced by a Polish Jew attempting to assimilate to American society. American critical response, framed in terms of a binary opposition between Poland and America, has, however, largely neglected the book's middle section which takes place in Vancouver. The Canadian episode tends to be elided with Hoffman's subsequent move to the United States so that the book is read as American immigrant autobiography. Yet Hoffman herself draws a sharp distinction between Canada and the United States, as is made plain by the tripartite structure of the book. By retrieving this crucial but neglected distinction, we can shed some light on the enigmatic status of the Canada-United States border in Hoffman's autobiography. How is it that Canada comes to represent absolute exile for Hoffman? Why is Canada identified with the rigidity of the Old World while the United States represents the liberating possibilities of the New World? I would suggest that in order for Hoffman to participate in the amnesiac American ritual of self-reinvention, she must lock her Old World memories safely on the other side of the border. In this way Canada functions as a receptacle for traumatic memories of the Holocaust which interfere with her autobiographical project of affirming her successful Americanization. But the troubling and opaque portions of the narrative Hoffman devotes to her Canadian experience generate generic tensions which destabilize her attempt to insert herself into a tradition of Jewish-American autobiography.
Gordon Pon Troubling Modernity and the Chinese “Model Minority”: Jeremy D. Popkin Parallel Lives: Autobiography and Academic Identity Academic autobiographies have become one of the most important forms of contemporary first-person literature. Now frequently written in mid-career and without any claim to validate the special importance of their authors’ academic accomplishments, these texts often challenge the distinction between personal and professional identities; increasingly, authors present them as part of their scholarship rather than something separated from it. At the same time, however, autobiographical publications often serve to destabilize their authors’ professional identities by showing the importance of private concerns in their lives. One of the ways in which academic authors have attempted to limit this destabilization has been by contributing to collective volumes in which a number of similarly situated authors discuss their own lives. Drawing on texts by members of a variety of academic disciplines and from authors from both the United States and Europe, this paper will attempt to define the several purposes that these collections of "parallel lives" have come to serve in the late-20th-century academy, and show how this transformation in academic autobiography is related to changes in conceptions of knowledge in the post-modern era.
Roger
J. Porter Autobiography, Exile, Home Numerous autobiographers have investigated the nature of their home country from the perspective of forced or voluntary exile. I look at André Aciman's Out of Egypt: A Memoir, Luc Sante's The Factory of Facts, Joseph Brodsky's "Less than One," and Primo Levi's The Reawakening, to see how these writers narrate childhood in the face of temporal and spatial displacements that threaten to undermine memory or to change radically the nature of the remembered object. I focus on the mode of memory itself for these writers, and how in each case it expresses the purpose for personal reconstruction. Of particular importance is the role that memory and re-creation play in the life of the writer's present; that is, in the motives for the act of autobiography in the situation of displacement. In the case of Levi, I am interested in how, upon his release from Auschwitz, he necessarily confronts a new sense of self in the process of return. Sante describes his return to his natal Belgium: "It was as if I was taking a walking tour of my subconscious." The nature of "source-hunting" and the kinds of evidence used to explain selfhood are what interest me in these writers, especially when the detective work crosses national boundaries and makes the nature of the self, as it is identified with nationality, intensely problematic. I am concerned as well with the ways stress and extremity inflect the nature of recall and of autobiographical reconstruction.
Alison Pryer The Seeing Cure: Jo Spence's Visual Narratives Jo Spence's autobiographical visual narratives disrupt and challenge dominant discourses of femininity, entering into some of the iconographical voids of western culture. Her transgressive images are often intentionally disturbing and ugly, in response to the tradition of the "sublime" female nude of both western high art and popular pornography. By emplying Bakhtin's notion of the "grotesque," I explore the ways in which Spence interrupts the traditionally oversimplified dichotomies of art and trash, and high and low culture. Through visual narratives of ageing, illness, and dying, Spence documents and interrogates the wider political, cultural and social matrix within which her illness and her life occur. Within this complex matrix, Spence's own embodied identity is ever changing, always "fractured and multiple, mobile and discontinuous" (Spence, 1995). Like a shaman, or wounded healer, Spence draws strength from her wounds. Through her art she makes them visible and offers them to the viewer as a "seeing cure." Spence's deliberate use of shock tactics may be considered a pedagogical act in that she creates moments of pedagogical possibility for viewers, moments in which they might stand apart from their everyday personas and ways of looking at the world. Thus, the transgressive and shocking--some might call it obscene-- elements of her art may be thought of as possessing both healing and educational qualities: they engage the viewer and serve as a catalyst for personal and social change.
Julie Rak This paper considers how Doukhobor autobiographical discourse can help to remake what has been understood as primarily Westernized autobiographic practice. I propose a critical reading of the term "witness narrative" to describe more accurately how Doukhobor writers and speakers negotiate what Vijay Mishra calls "the trauma of forced migration" between Western autobiographical tropes and Doukhobor oral tropes about bodily memory and communal suffering. In the prison narrative of William Soukerov, witness narrative represents a way for Soukerov to connect his subjectivity to an event rather than to a negotiation between a psychologized unconscious and the conscious mind, which I argue is the more usual Western way to understand singularity. The oral/written scenes of his retelling of the event lifts the event away from private experience and connects it to two things: a Doukhobor collective imaginary about migration, torture and imprisonment, and non-Doukhobor responses to the Doukhobor imaginary.
Valerie
Raoul Posthumously Published Diaries by Women: Who Decides Whose Life Is Saved? In this sequel to the paper I gave last year in Beijing, I will take a second look at the metaphor of "Life-Saving(s)" in the posthumously published diaries of nineteenth-century French women writing in a Catholic context. Both Eugénie de Guérin and Elisabeth Leseur saw their journals as a means to work towards the salvation of a cynical male other. Their own psychological salvation and posthumous fame were achieved ostensibly as by-products. Revisiting the metaphors of "investment", "risk" and "profit/reward" deployed in several journals, I will approach the financial imagery involved again, this time in response to a question from P. Lejeune as to whether my analysis risked making fun of the writers. I will focus on problems of reading such texts from a contemporary feminist perspective. On what basis does one pay the authors back with interest, or refuse them further credit? Once the journal is an object of consumption, a second set of images emerges based on computer functions. Who, and how, decides to discard such texts, to file them inaccessibly, or trash them? On what basis are they assessed as worth retrieving, restoring, even revising, replacing, recycling? Who saves what, and as life and text merge, to what extent must any critical reading appear as a betrayal by a shareholder, breaking a tacit bargain, or a sign of our own insolvency?
Linda Haverty Rugg Imagining Himself: Ingmar Bergman's Textual and Cinematic Autobiographies Over the last decade, the Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman has crossed over into the genre of the written autobiography, with two volumes (Laterna Magica and Images) devoted to an account of his own life, and two others (Best Intentions and Private Conversations) attempting a reconstruction of his parents' lives and their stormy relationship. There are two points of interest for me here. First, the relation between Bergman's cinematic (often masked) autobiographical oeuvre and his textual forays into autobiography opens up a fascinating look at the roles of image and language in self-construction. Can we speak at all of cinematic autobiography, and if so, what place does it have in relation to textual autobiography? Particularly the problem of the substitute body in cinematic autobiography interests me-- in most cases, the cinematic autobiographer must choose an actor/stand-in for the self (always in the case of the representation of childhood), and this must have some impact on the connection between the narrating and experiencing selves, who are linked by the pronoun "I" in most textual autobiographies. There is also the problematic issue of the collaborative nature of cinema, as opposed to the ordinarily individual producer of textual autobiography. Can a team make an autobiography for one of their number? What role does Bergman's cameraman, Sven Nykvist, play in the process of producing Bergman? How do cinematic language and thinking find their way into the textual autobiographies of Bergman? Second, what are we to make of the books that reach back into the years before Bergman's birth and deal with events with which he could have no personal acquaintance, namely the private conversations and struggles of his parents? Are these a form of autobiographical writing? I think that the argument might be made that these books do represent an autobiographical form, one that is informed and underwritten by Bergman's experience in the cinema. In this way, I hope to combine the two points of my paper and the two types of autobiographical production in Bergman's oeuvre.
Joanne
Saul Displacement and Self-Representation: Theorizing the Contemporary Canadian "Biotext" The focus of this paper is on writers who choose to frame their questions about cultural difference within the context of writing about their own lives and their own personal experiences of displacement. The paper explores the complex strategies of self-representation in Daphne Marlatt's Ghost Works (1993), in Fred Wah's Diamond Grill (1996), and in Mothertalk (1997), the collaboration between Mary Kiyoshi Kiyooka, Roy Kiyooka, and Daphne Marlatt, and argues that there is an attempt in such texts not only to tell stories in order to claim experience, but also to express a sense of dislocation and a lack of belonging by using textual strategies of estrangement and defamiliarization. These particular texts foreground their uses of a poetics of process rooted in the long poem of the 1970s that has not historically been associated with the generic categories that the biotext disrupts, including autobiography, biography, travel writing, and immigrant "coming to voice" narratives. The tension that is generated by the impulse to write one's self into place, while, at the same time, recognizing the various and complex nodes of belonging--and not belonging--that are linked to racial, ethnic, national and gendered subjectivity, gives rise to the textual innovations at work, albeit in different ways, in each of these biotexts. As Wah argues, "home is how, not where, you hang your hat." This paper will examine how, in each of these works, the text itself becomes a space of articulation, a space of naming oneself.
Yuko Shibata Hybrid Text: Ethnography of Japanese Canadian Women This paper is a feminist ethnography of Japanese Candian women of diverse backgrounds. It is based on my research in 1975-1976 and 1996-1997 in Greater Vancouver, BC, investigating the life histories and narratives of five generations of Japanese Canadian women (Issei: pre-war immigrant women; Nisei: daughters of Issei; Sansei: granddaughters of Issei; Shin-Issei: post-war immigrant women; and Shin-Nisei: daughters of Shin-Issei). I have taken a reflexive position on the production of ethnography using myself as a filter of Japanese Canadian women's narratives. The paper is presented in a form of life writing and/or autoethnography since I, the writer, myself have grown into a status of Japanese Canadian woman from a visiting student and a Japanese citizen adapting to Canadian culture. This ethnography is a hybrid one and is experiential in nature since I have included my own life experiences as an anthropologist/researcher as well as a Shin-Issei, a post-war immigrant of early to middle adulthood, from a single woman to a married woman to a wife and a mother. The paper delineates how individual life histories and narratives indicate a woman's construction of reality in relation to her experience of being Japanese and Japanese Canadian and how they situated their autobiographies within the social history of Japan and Canada and within individual women's life history.
Sidonie
Smith Women as Artists and Subjects in Visual and Performance Media (with Julia Watson) We will offer an introduction to the autobiographical practices of twentieth-century women artists in the Americas and Europe who use visual or performance media. Such artists work at the interstices of genres and media. Their work, therefore, explores territories and border tensions among text, image, and context in women's creative self-representation. Many of these artists improvise upon established forms, media, and tropes of self-portraiture in order to represent women "other"-wise than they have been encoded in dominant cultural history, "talking back" to gender stereotypes through parody, impersonation, serial imagery, and a range of strategic interventions. We will situate these visual and performative self-presentations in the context of women's written autobiographical narratives as possible. Among the issues we will raise are the following (to be illustrated in slides from several artists' self-portraits): 1. In what ways is the reader/spectator asked to construct a new kind of subject in the autobiographical contract that a woman artist invites in her visual or performative self-portrait? 2. How is women's "experience" related to the visualization and/or performance of the female subject? What are the sources of self-imagery? How is memory addressed in visual or performance autobiography? 3. How is identity gendered in the artistic presentation? How is the relationship of gender and sexuality negotiated? Does the artist's work offer a critique of construction(s) of gender, or suggest an interplay of complicity and resistance with the spectator? 4. How do the terms of identity in the visual presentation or performance intersect and reinterpret parameters of ethnicity or race? Do they image invisible subjects? Engage the terms of identity politics? What is the politics of public display in the piece? 5. How are we to understand the positioning of the artist in terms of issues in Modernism? Of Postmodernism? As possible, we will situate the artist in the contexts of specific contemporary movements. 6. How do we understand the representational practices of women artists in terms of feminist agendas and itineraries? In what ways do they engage current debates or enter into dialogue with earlier feminist theory and praxis?
Erin Soros Making Tracks: Anorexia Nervosa and Heroin Addiction as Embodied Writing Shifting between autobiographical narrative and theoretical reflection, my paper explores how anorexia nervosa and heroin addiction function as two forms of embodied writing of trauma. I argue that my experience of self-starvation and my brother's experience of heroin addiction were both attempts to resist familial violence by inscribing it into flesh. Afflicted each by our respective obsessions, we carved our bodies paper thin. But when I starved and my brother injected, we were not simply reenacting a traumatic experience but also coding it within and against a gendered topos. While the anorexic refuses to enable the outside to enter her flesh, the heroin addict repeatedly punctures the bodily boundary that keeps the outside from coming in. For one, the closed mouth. For the other, the hypodermic. The anorexic denies penetration; the addict demands it. While both forms of self-flagellation can enable one to master a history of abuse by repeatedly twisting it back against oneself, the two practices were in fact overdetermined, sexually coded in as complex and paradoxical a fashion as the original violation. Woven throughout the essay is an analysis of representation-- specifically the representation of one's history through the medium of flesh. What I argue is that an attempt to control violence by mapping it onto one's body entraps one within the paradoxical failure of representation itself. The experience of trauma and the inscription of this experience together form an impossible knot. The suffering becomes what it represents even as it fails to present it.
Joseph C.
Swatski Autobiography as Improvisation: Listening to Charles Mingus's Beneath the Underdog The life of gargantuan 20th century jazz composer Charles Mingus could not be contained or conveyed through conventional autobiography. Like his musical compositions, Mingus's autobiography, Beneath the Underdog (1972), mixed forms, resulting in a hybrid text. The subtitle of the book cues its nature: "His World as Composed by Mingus." This paper will consider Mingus's prose as analogous to his (musical) compositional technique. In this presentation, excerpts from Beneath the Underdog will be 'read' alongside musical works from the Mingus catalogue: "Tijuana Moods" (1957), "Mingus Ah Um" (1959), "Blues and Roots" (1960), "Mingus Dynasty" (1960), "Oh Yeah" (1960), and "The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady" (1963). Each will receive a brief explication tracing its evolution from Mingus's personal experience to living music, and how sections of the autobiography echo or parallel their musical counterparts. According to Mingus, a composer took existing structures and created "over" them, hence the idea that jazz musicians are composers. Mingus claimed that his talent for (musical) composition came from God, and as Nat Hentoff noted, the autobiography underscores Mingus's lifelong search for a 'personal morality.' A close reading of Beneath the Underdog as an extended improvisation may elucidate both claims.
Charlotte
Townsend-Gault The portrait, arguably, is distinguished from other representations of the figure in western art by its mode of address--portraits tend to anticipate, or insist upon, how and where they are to be received. They propose their own answers to the question Who is it for? Self-portraiture can be still more direct. This paper will consider some well-known examples of Native American self-portraiture from the last fifteen years--by Lyle Wilson, Carl Beam, James Luna, Rebecca Belmore, Shelley Niro and Neil Eustache–and argue that, by re-working some of the conventions of the genre, they have established the self-portrait as a key element in the definition and projection of the native person. It will be suggested that the Native American self-portrait is distinguished by a particular tension between self-scrutiny and self-revelation. These ‘autobiographies’ are also marked by their ability to direct the responses of various audiences, and have become important sites for working out where the boundaries against assimilation are set.
Reclaiming Home and Self: Trauma and Mourning in Memoirs by Jewish Austrian Reemigres Very few of the approximately 130,000 exiled Austrians persecuted as a result of the Nuremberg Laws returned to Austria permanently after 1945. Although the state, which had defined them as belonging to the same group regardless of gender, class, educational background, profession, political affiliation, or religion, had ceased to exist, they found themselves and their experiences marginalized or denied in both public and private discourse in postwar Austria. Non-Jewish, non-exiled Austrians overwhelmingly assigned themselves the roles of victims of Hitlerite aggression and Allied bombings in their efforts to distance themselves from Nazi Germany. Despite the marginalization of returning Jews, a small body of memoir literature written by "Jewish" Austrians who fled Austria as adults and who did not experience the concentration camps has emerged that challenges the mainstream victim narratives. A disparate group with varying relationships to Judaism, the memoir writers were nonetheless bound together by state-sanctioned anti-Semitism. As a result, their individual life stories capture group experiences that are notably absent from the collective memories of the general Austrian population. The memoirs are moving accounts of the profound loss of "Heimat" (home/homeland) and self and the desire to recover the loss in part by returning home. The memoirists restore at least a part of a sense of self and their Austrian identities by revisiting and reclaiming their stolen past. An examination of the writers' attempts to (re)connect to an Austrian "we" through their pre-Anschluss past reveals the complex and often conflicting nature of reconstituting an identity for these Jewish Austrian reemigres in post-Holocaust Austria. The strategies they employ to negotiate their Jewish and Austrian identities reflect to varying degrees unspoken ambivalence toward their Jewish heritage, reveal an awareness of the well-documented anti-Semitism in both pre-Anschluss Austria and postwar Austria, and demonstrate the sense of a moral obligation to self-identity as a Jew after the Holocaust. In this talk, I
examine the way three writers conceive of their history and their family's
histories as implicitly Austrian to illustrate the ways in which Jewish
and Austrian are not mutually exclusive characters. I particularly
consider their use of family photographs to construct
a particular (Jewish) Austrian history.
Nancy Wachowich James
Watkins Historical Trauma, Regional Identity, and the Location of White Southern Masculinity in Ross McElwee’s Sherman’s March Ross McElwee’s independent documentary film, Sherman’s March (1986), in which McElwee depicts his attempts to retrace the route of Sherman’s famous "March to the Sea" while relating this early form of "scorched earth" warfare to the proliferation of nuclear weapons that was taking place at the time of the film’s production, involves a number of autobiographical acts in which identities are changed. Early on in the film, the purported focus on Sherman becomes eclipsed by McElwee’s fascination and involvement with a number of women he meets along the route of Sherman’s March. Thus, before our very eyes, the film itself changes its identity from standard historical documentary to autobiographical cinéma verité. In the process, McElwee seeks to redefine the popularized identity of (white) southern womanhood and, by extension, the South itself by presenting an inclusive collection of "real" southern women. Finally, McElwee uses the film to transform his autobiographical persona from that of the lovelorn, failed New York artist to that of the successful auteur who has convincingly laid his claim to the American South of his birth. By conflating the personal traumas of unrequited love and childhood memories (at one point he recalls the time he viewed, on the eve of his thirteenth birthday, a nuclear test in the Pacific, the memory of which still gives him nightmares) with the historical trauma of the South’s sufferings during the Civil War, McElwee presents post-modern masculine subjectivity as a knot of conflicted identifications that have a common focus in loss and absence.
Julia
Watson Women as Artists and Subjects in Visual and Performance Media (with Sidonie Smith) We will offer an introduction to the autobiographical practices of twentieth-century women artists in the Americas and Europe who use visual or performance media. Such artists work at the interstices of genres and media. Their work, therefore, explores territories and border tensions among text, image, and context in women's creative self-representation. Many of these artists improvise upon established forms, media, and tropes of self-portraiture in order to represent women "other"-wise than they have been encoded in dominant cultural history, "talking back" to gender stereotypes through parody, impersonation, serial imagery, and a range of strategic interventions. We will situate these visual and performative self-presentations in the context of women's written autobiographical narratives as possible. Among the issues we will raise are the following (to be illustrated in slides from several artists' self-portraits): 1. In what ways is the reader/spectator asked to construct a new kind of subject in the autobiographical contract that a woman artist invites in her visual or performative self-portrait? 2. How is women's "experience" related to the visualization and/or performance of the female subject? What are the sources of self-imagery? How is memory addressed in visual or performance autobiography? 3. How is identity gendered in the artistic presentation? How is the relationship of gender and sexuality negotiated? Does the artist's work offer a critique of construction(s) of gender, or suggest an interplay of complicity and resistance with the spectator? 4. How do the terms of identity in the visual presentation or performance intersect and reinterpret parameters of ethnicity or race? Do they image invisible subjects? Engage the terms of identity politics? What is the politics of public display in the piece? 5. How are we to understand the positioning of the artist in terms of issues in Modernism? Of Postmodernism? As possible, we will situate the artist in the contexts of specific contemporary movements. 6. How do we understand the representational practices of women artists in terms of feminist agendas and itineraries? In what ways do they engage current debates or enter into dialogue with earlier feminist theory and praxis?
Leah White Overcoming Nazi Oppression: Charlotte Salomon, Autobiography, and the Reconstruction of Self Charlotte Salomon's Life? or Theater? is a remarkable and unique autobiography. The autobiography is written in the form of a musical play and is constructed around a series of over 700 small paintings. These paintings are accompanied by a complete cast of characters, occasional dialogue, textual narration, and musical cues. Although the format of the autobiography is extraordinary in and of itself, the story it tells should not be overshadowed. Born in 1917 to a Jewish family living in Berlin, Charlotte Salomon's young adult life was threatened by the torment of the German Nazi party. This paper explores how Charlotte Salomon turned to autobiography as a means through which she was able to both confront Nazi persecution as well as re-construct her identity within this context of oppression. She accomplishes this not only through the written text of the autobiography, but also through the visual art which grounds this text. This analysis of Life? or Theater? is based in a postmodern-feminist approach to subjectivity, where identity is viewed as fragmented and shifting. Kathy Ferguson’s concept of "mobile subjectivities" helps to explain how Salomon is able to construct multiple interpretations of self. Additionally, the work of art theorist Griselda Pollock aids in the explanation of the visual power of Salomon’s art work.
Gillian
Whitlock Autobiography and Other Unnatural Acts Contemporary South African autobiography is extraordinary, unmistakably a world of its own. Tattooed across its surface are a series of political events that invade and configure the private domain: the events at Sharpville, Rivonia and Soweto, legislation such as the Education and Group Areas Acts, Mandela's walk to freedom, the first non-racial elections and, most recently, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. As Sindiwe Magona suggests in To My Children's Children. An Autobiography (1991), in South Africa disparate events - in her case having to apply for a pass book, the death of two students, and South Africa becoming a Republic in 1961 - are irretrievably linked in her memory, they are 'strands of the same hideous whole. In them, terribly articulated, was our voicelessness.' (87) This writing is a reminder of how autobiography is hostage to publishers, the tastes of the reading public, and shifts in the social, political and cultural life of the nation. Although autobiographic writing has been critical in the processes of change and resistance to the apartheid imaginary, the grounds of resistance are deeply conflicted and in ongoing transformation. The texts themselves are embedded within the shifting possibilities and constraints in the last decade of apartheid and the first years of freedom. This paper will examine the different threshold for autobiographic expression established around the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. What kinds of autobiographical expression occur in this new, more inclusive political moment? What truths can be told? What narratives are sanctioned? Reconciliation is a process which sets out to bring the nation into contact with the ghosts of its past. These ghosts set a whole range of things into motion, including new modes of authority, truth and choice in the politics of subjectivity and identity. South African autobiography is, then, a reminder of the intersections between autobiographic writing and culturally prevalent discourses of truth and identity.
Zhao
Baisheng Socializing the Self: The American Experience and Identity Transformation In his Autobiography at Forty and Diary while Studying Abroad, Hu Shi divides his early life into three distinctive stages: nine year classical training in his home village (1895 -1904); six year new education in Shanghai (1904-1910) and seven year study at Cornell and Columbia (1910-1917). Interestingly, he uses during these periods about 13 different names, including pen names, nicknames, zi and hao. Behind his constant renaming lies a ceaseless search for an identity. This paper discusses his three major names, showing a change of identity from "master" (xiansheng), "self-conqueror" (zishengsheng), "sage" (shengren) to "national mentor" (guoren daoshi), "public opinion maker " (yulunjia ), "citizen of the world" (shijie zhiren). I mainly explore the impact of intercultural communications, especially the American experience, on identity transformation. Hu Shi's passion for public speaking, his involvement with the Cosmopolitan Club and his obsession with numbers play a pivotal role in the shaping of a new identity. Equally important, his habitual weaving of public documents such as news summaries, speeches, even treaties into his private writing is a clear indicator of his autobiographical vision: socializing the self.
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