In the note that opens the fall issue of Biography, the editors reflect on the how the landscape has changed since the journal launched in 1978:
Far more articles now deal with the Global South, and the impact of memoir, biography, testimonio, oral history, personal witness before boards and commissions, and online platforms and social media on our notions of identity, and our awareness of marginalized and suppressed peoples has been astounding, and has demanded our attention. A quick look at the topics of Biography’s most recent, and very popular, special issues and clusters—Posthumanism, Baleful Post-coloniality, Corporate Personhood, Malcolm X, Lives in Occupied Palestine, and Online Lives 2.0, and with Indigenous Lives and Caste and Life Narratives on their way—suggests that the interdisciplinary orientation of the journal has endured, but taken on new forms.
In this new issue, Cynthia G. Franklin’s essay “The Afterlife of the Text,” describes how, through launching the Biography issue “Life in Occupied Palestine” in Palestine and elsewhere, contributors’ stories took on a life and generated stories of their own—ones that, while continuing to document the impact of Israeli occupation and settler colonialism, point towards possibilities for decolonial dialogue, friendship, community, and political organizing.
Other featured articles include:
- Defining Metabiography in Historical Perspective: Between Biomyths and Documentary by Edward Saunders
- Soviet Theories of Biography and the Aesthetics of Personality by Dmitri Kalugin
- Secret Police Files, Tangled Life Narratives: The 1.5 Generation
of Communist Surveillance by Ioana Luca
Find the full text of the issue at Project MUSE
About the Journal
For over thirty years, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly has explored the theoretical, generic, historical, and cultural dimensions of life-writing.
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