Category: Biography

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

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Find the full text of the issue at Project MUSE

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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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Unsolicited manuscripts between 2,500 to 7,500 words are welcome. Email inquiries and editorial correspondence to biograph@hawaii.edu.

Online Lives 2.0

Guest Editors: Laurie McNeill & John David Zuern

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION

Online Lives 2.0: Introduction
Laurie McNeill and John David Zuern

Looking back to Biography’s 2003 “Online Lives,” the coeditors reflect on continuities and analyze new developments in Internet-based auto/biographical production since the advent of Web 2.0. They outline recurring themes in the essays in Online Lives 2.0, which include the merging of public and private life, online self-curation, the socioeconomic dimensions of online self-presentation, and the filtering and falsification of lives in social media, and they explore the implications of these issues for auto/biography studies.

Continue reading “Biography Vol. 38, no. 2, 2015”

Auto/biography in Transit

Guest Editors: Jason Breiter, Orly Lael Netzer, Julie Rak, & Lucinda Rasmussen

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION

Introduction: Auto/Biography in Transit
Jason Breiter, Orly Lael Netzer, Julie Rak, Lucinda Rasmussen, v

The essays in this special issue engage with a range of issues relating to Auto/Biography in Transit, the title of the 2014 International Auto/Biography Association (IABA) conference held in Banff, from which the issue emerged. The essays have been divided into two areas of inquiry: Documents and Displacements. Those in the first section address the status of the document as a technology of the self, or think about how cultural producers document their lives. Essays in the second section explore critical approaches and texts that signify how both the study of life writing and its objects of inquiry are themselves in transit, and have the potential to change our ideas about the field itself.

Continue reading “Biography Vol. 38, no. 1, 2015”

Editors’ Note, iii

ARTICLES

Literary Biography as a Critical Form
Philip Holden, 917
The recent proliferation of formally innovative literary biographies suggests that the genre has an important critical function. Literary biographies are more than simply an ancillary genre; rather, they ask questions regarding the manner in which readers relate to the implied authors of the literary texts they encounter, and their use of this relationship in their own projects of individualization in modern society.

Continue reading “Biography, vol. 37, no. 4 (2014)”

Editors’ Note, v

ARTICLES

Antjie Krog and the Autobiography of Postcolonial Becoming
Elizabeth Rodrigues, 725

Imagination disrupts documentary, as Antjie Krog compares the experience of attending the opening hearings of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission to being reborn. Figuratively placing herself back at the beginning of human development, in the early pages of Country of My Skull Krog registers the profound personal effects of the TRC’s public process of national redefinition, and equates its beginning with the beginning of a new life—or potential beginning, as, fittingly, her rebirth is not yet narrated. Before her, and before the South African nation, stands an imperative of transformation so profound that the comparison to physical birth seems apt, both appropriately extreme and appropriately impossible. No person and no country can literally go “back”; self and nation must attempt immediate change in medias res. Krog’s bold imagining invites us to consider how her autobiographical works stage the narrative of development in the context of postcoloniality as a process that cannot rely on inborn or teleological trajectories for its beginnings and ends but must actively and urgently construct its horizons.

Continue reading “Biography, vol. 37, no. 3 (2014)”

Life in Occupied Palestine

Guest Editors: Cynthia G. Franklin, Morgan Cooper and Ibrahim G. Aoudé

Dedication, v

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION
Life in Occupied Palestine: Three Cafés and a Special Issue
Cynthia G. Franklin, Morgan Cooper, Ibrahim G. Aoudé, vii

Against the backdrop of Israel’s invasions of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip during the summer of 2014, the co-editors introduce this special issue: its formation, and the importance and power of the contributors’ writings about life in Palestine under conditions of occupation, apartheid, and settler colonialism.
Continue reading “Biography, vol. 37, no. 2 (2014)”

Guest Editors:
Purnima Bose and Laura E. Lyons

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION
Life Writing and Corporate Personhood
Purnima Bose and Laura E. Lyons, v

This introduction outlines different manifestations of corporate personhood, including advertising, skinvertising, activist corporate impersonation, and the equation of corporations with celebrity CEOs. We contextualize corporate personhood in relation to recent attempts to claim rights for fetuses, along with more progressive articulations of personhood in various environmental and animal rights campaigns.
Continue reading “Biography, vol. 37, no. 1 (2014)”

EDITOR’S NOTE

 

ARTICLES

Biography and the Political Unconscious: Ellison, Toomer, Jameson, and the Politics of Symptomatic Reading
Barbara Foley, 649

As demonstrated by the workings of the political unconscious in Jean Toomer’s Cane and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, investigation of authorial biography is an indispensable component of Marxist literary criticism. Symptomatic reading, while derogated by the advocates of “surface reading,” remains crucial to textual interpretation.
Continue reading “Biography, vol. 36, no. 4 (2013)”

DEDICATION
In Loving Memory: Jayne Cortez, iii

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

“He the One We All Knew”
Njoroge Njoroge, 485

This issue is dedicated to an examination of the life and thought of El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz. The contributors explore different facets of the biography, legacy, and memory of Malcolm X and his relevance to contemporary politics. By introducing new research and building on previous scholarship, this volume seeks to expand and elaborate upon the complicated life narrative of the man we know as Malcolm X.
Continue reading “Biography, vol. 36, no. 3 (2013)”

EDITORS’ NOTE, iii

ARTICLES

A Series of Dated Traces: Diaries and Film
Christian Quendler, 339

This article investigates deep conceptual affinities between diaries and cinema by reading Philippe Lejeune’s minimal definition of the diary as a “series of dated traces” against theories of film. I propose to regard written testimonial traces and filmic documentary traces as indexes of different modes and complementary semiotic orders. This view will shed light on borrowings and exchanges between filmic documents and personal testimonies, and account for the invigorating role of the diary as a genre of personal and medial explorations.
Continue reading “Biography, vol. 36, no. 2 (2013)”