Biography, vol. 27, no. 2 (2004)

Editor’s Note, p. iii

ARTICLES

Juan Velasco
Automitografías: The Border Paradigm and Chicana/o Autobiography, p. 313

For Chicana/o cultural critics, the border paradigm has defined the boundaries of writing and experience in contemporary Chicana/o autobiography, and has constituted a valuable contribution to American Studies. In fact, the unique voices coming from Chicana/o autobiography are expressed through a network of cultural codes involving liminality and hybridity, the rewriting of borders, and the challenging of boundaries created by mainstream cultures and official truth. Based on this deep relationship of border paradigm, Chicana/o experience, and the writing and representation of that experience, in this article I will discuss the possibility of building an organic and systematic methodology for studying autobiography.

Hosam Aboul-Ela
The Writer Becomes Text: Naguib Mahfouz and State Nationalism in Egypt, p. 339

In October of 1994, Naguib Mahfouz, Egypt’s respected octogenarian Nobel Laureate, fell victim to an assassination attempt outside his home in Cairo. The outpouring of support for the aging writer during his convalescence eventually evolved into a discourse that reflected the way the Egyptian State had been complicit all along in making the writer a symbol for the regime. Ultimately, the packaging of Mahfouz by the Egyptian government made him an embodiment of the exploited and powerless Third World intellectual in the era of globalization.

Michael Keren
National Icons and Personal Identities in Three Israeli Autobiographies, p. 357

This analysis of autobiographies by three Israeli military and political leaders—Yigal Allon, Moshe Dayan, and Yitzhak Rabin—explores how the three men’s status as national icons affected their life writing, and how the different ways in which they negotiated a compromise between the iconicity attributed to them in their youth and their identities as mature human beings affected some of their political attitudes, especially toward Arab-Israeli coexistence.

REVIEWED ELSEWHERE, p. 384
Excerpts from recent reviews of biographies, autobiographies, and other works of interest

LIFELINES, p. 475
Upcoming events, calls for papers, and news from the field

CONTRIBUTORS, p. 481