IN LOVING MEMORY: LINDON BARRETT, v
EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION
Something Other Than Autobiography: Collaborative Life-Narratives in the Americas—An Introduction,
Kathleen McHugh and Catherine Komisaruk, vii
This Introduction to a special essay cluster on “Collaborative Life-Narratives in the Americas” suggests a field of texts and critical practices, arising from the material circumstances of colonialism in the Americas, that counters traditional autobiographical narrative. The essays explore the complicated relationships among literacy, identity, colonialism, and conquest, as the narration of marginalized lives invokes collaboration with technologies of literacy.
ARTICLES
Rape Narratives, Rape Silences: Sexual Violence and Judicial Testimony in Colonial Guatemala
Catherine Komisaruk, 369
Using cases documented in the colonial Spanish judicial archives of Central America, this essay considers litigants’ depositions as a form of collaborative life-narrative, recorded on paper by government notaries in a court system that functioned according to dominant social ideologies. An analysis of the transcribed narratives of certain rape survivors suggests that other rapes were never recorded. Pointing to the ways that legal culture determined which charges would be brought and which cases would be heard in the courts, Komisaruk illustrates both contested and cooperative collaborations between colonial institutions and colonized subjects. These collaborations produced
a historical record of Spanish American life, but also created silences where histories went unrecorded, notably in cases of sexual violence.
“As Gay and as Indian as They Chose”: Collaboration and Counter-Ethnography in In the Land of the Grasshopper Song
Julia Watson, 397
This essay illuminates multiple complexities in collaborative life writing through an analysis of In the Land of the Grasshopper Song: Two Women in the Klamath River Indian Country in 1908–09 by Mary Ellicott Arnold and Mabel Reed, a book in the form of a journal recounting colonial contact between whites and indigenous people prior to the 1910 United States appropriation of native lands in what is now far northwestern California. Arnold and Reed function as amateur ethnographers, narrating a complex tale of encounters and negotiations, but they leave out those that had to do with their lesbian relationship. Thus, their overt collaboration masked that of a more private kind. Watson examines the very complicated speaking position(s) of Arnold and Reed in relation to the native population, their white cohort, and each other, illuminating the various modes of collaboration that emerge from this multiply voiced text: co-optation, coercion, collusion, cooperation, collectivity,
compromise, and camouflage.
Profane Illuminations: History and Collaboration in James Luna and Isaac Artenstein’s The History of the Luiseño People
Kathleen McHugh, 429
This essay studies narrative collaboration in film, focusing on The History of the Luiseño People, produced collaboratively by performance artist James Luna and filmmaker Isaac Artenstein. The film uses the ephemeral quality of performance art to allegorize the loss of a material history that would register its story. Rather than invoking division, plurality, and ambiguity, Luna and
Artenstein limit their film’s historical space to the media and the domestic, and its temporality to a version of what Walter Benjamin called “nowtime.” Although History’s apparent collaboration with negative stereotypes of Native Americans has angered many critics, McHugh reads the film as an instance of Benjaminian “profane illumination.” Her essay details Luna and Artenstein’s profane apprehension of the historical, as she considers their strategies within the contexts in which the film was funded, produced, distributed, and exhibited.
REVIEWS
Clio’s Daughters: British Women Making History, 1790–1899, edited by Lynette Felber
Reviewed by Stephanie Barczewski, 461
Her Life Historical: Exemplarity and Female Saints’ Lives in Late Medieval England, by Catherine Sanok
Reviewed by Nancy Bradley Warren, 463
Whore Biographies, 1700–1825, edited by Julie Peakman
Reviewed by Marilyn Booth, 466
Traveling Economies: American Women’s Travel Writing, by Jennifer Bernhardt Steadman
Reviewed by Sharon M. Harris, 473
Life Writing: Autobiography, Biography, and Travel Writing in Contemporary Literature, edited by Koray Melikoğlu
Reviewed by Jonathan Tadashi Naito, 475
The Cambridge Companion to the African-American Slave Narrative, by Audrey Fisch
Reviewed by Jesse L. Dunbar, 478
Some Family: The Mormons and How Humanity Keeps Track of Itself, by Donald Harman Akenson
Reviewed by Kathleen Flake, 480
The History and Poetics of Scientific Biography, edited by Thomas Söderqvist
Reviewed by Theodore M. Porter, 484
Le Propre de l’écriture de soi, by Françoise Simonet-Tenant
Reviewed by Zahi Zalloua, 486
This Crazy Thing a Life: Australian Jewish Autobiography, by Richard Freadman
Reviewed by Suzanne Rutland, 489
Lights, Camera, History: Portraying the Past in Film, edited by Richard Francaviglia and Jerry Rodnitzky
Reviewed by Ina Rae Hark, 491
Sporting Lives: Metaphor and Myth in American Sports Autobiographies, by James W. Pipkin
Reviewed by Peter Carino, 494
REVIEWED ELSEWHERE, 497
Excerpts from recent reviews of biographies, autobiographies, and other works of interest
CONTRIBUTORS, 553
