Biography, vol. 33, no. 3 (2010)

Editors’ Note, iii

ARTICLES

Remediating Gorilla Girl: Rape Warfare and the Limits of Humanitarian Storytelling
Gillian Whitlock, 471

Dian Fossey and the gorillas remain familiar figures in the global public sphere. But how do their life stories relate to the ongoing presence of mourning and violence in central Africa now? This essay considers feminist engagements with the “distant suffering” of victims of rape warfare at this unique contact zone where species meet.

Political Intuition and African Autobiographies of Childhood
Alioune Sow, 498

This essay analyzes and provides an alternative reading of Camara Laye’s L’enfant noir and Wole Soyinka’s Aké: The Years of Childhood. It examines how the two texts defy codifications and ideological expectations of childhood autobiographical narratives, and explores their intricate autobiographical determinations and motives. It demonstrates that, when it comes to narratives situated in the colonial period, Camara Laye and Wole Soyinka have provided alternative engagements with colonialism, adding nuance to the literary representations and accounts of childhood in African letters.

“I Was Never at War With My Tongue”: The Third Language and the Performance of Bilingualism in Richard Rodriguez
Jeehyun Lim, 518

In this essay, I revisit the Chicano writer Richard Rodriguez’s much-debated opposition to bilingual education. I focus on Rodriguez’s trope of the third language to limn his politics and aesthetic of intimacy. Despite his denial of a public presence for linguistic hybridity, I suggest that a performance of bilingualism permeates Rodriguez’s writing.

REVIEWS

Signifying Bodies: Disability in Contemporary Life Writing, by G. Thomas Couser
Reviewed by Georgina Kleege, 543

Doctors in the Making: Memoirs and Medical Education, by Suzanne Poirier
Reviewed by Ann Jurecic, 546

Postcolonial Life-Writing: Culture, Politics, and Self-Representation, by Bart Moore-Gilbert
Reviewed by David Huddart, 549

Literary Biography: An Introduction, by Michael Benton
Reviewed by Kathryn Hughes, 552

Romantic Autobiography in England, edited by Eugene Stelzig
Reviewed by Julian North, 557

Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic: Circulations of Knowledge and Authority in the Iberian and English Imperial Worlds, by Lisa Voigt
Reviewed by Pauline Turner Strong, 560

Approaching an Auschwitz Survivor: Holocaust Testimony and its Transformations, edited by Jürgen Matthäus
Reviewed by Ann L. Saltzman, 563

Epistolary Korea: Letters in the Communicative Space of the Chosŏn, 1392–1910, edited by JaHyun Kim Haboush
Reviewed by Joy S. Kim, 565

Journal personnel et correspondance (1785–1939) ou les affinités electives, by Françoise Simonet-Tenant
Reviewed by Mary Poteau-Tralie, 567

Jesus Research: An International Perspective—The First Princeton-Prague Symposium on Jesus Research, edited by James H. Charlesworth with Petr Pokorný
Reviewed by Bruce Chilton, 570

REVIEWED ELSEWHERE, 573
Excerpts from recent reviews of biographies, autobiographies, and other works of interest

CONTRIBUTORS, 653