Category: Biography

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTIONS

Baleful Postcoloniality and Auto/Biography
Salah D. Hassan, 1

This Introduction suggests how the essays in this Special Issue explore the continued relevance of the term postcoloniality by critically engaging with both postcolonial studies and life writing. By understanding postcoloniality as the global condition of the current baleful historic conjuncture—as the paradoxical global condition in which classes, peoples, and nations are subject to residual and often overt manifestations of imperialism and colonialism at a time when no contemporary government, state, international or supranational body, or ideology defines itself as imperialist or colonialist—past critical practices and celebratory tendencies in postcolonial studies can be corrected to recognize the dire conditions of global politics in the present.

Representing Baleful Specters and Uncanny Repetitions: Life Writing and Imperialism’s Afterlives
David Álvarez, 10

The articles in this Special Issue scrutinize life writing that provides varied evidence of balefulness—in the sense of a harm-causing force and a painful subjective condition—as a constitutive trait of the not-quite post-colonial present. Addressing themselves to a variety of sites, conjunctures, and texts from around the globe, the essays deploy, test, interrogate, and revise the term, as they analyze forms of life writing that are shaped by or that shape imperialism’s afterlives in the present. Singly and jointly, the articles shed light on the historical and contemporary structures that assail us, and on the possible contingencies that might counter them. Together, they convey the appositeness of “baleful postcoloniality” and the resistances to it as signs of and signposts to the dark yet hopeful times we inhabit.
Continue reading “Biography, vol. 36, no. 1 (2013): "Baleful Postcoloniality"”

EDITORS’ NOTE

ARTICLES

In Remembrance: Dr. Julia Swindells
Margaretta Jolly, 587

Witness or False Witness: Metrics of Authenticity, Collective I-Formations, and the Ethic of Verification in First-Person Testimony
Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, 590

One possible response to allegations of hoaxing that surround the contemporary traffic in witness narratives is to re-theorize issues central to testimonial narration. Rather than arguing that the truth or falsity of witness narratives can be definitively determined, we complicate the transparency of the first-person narrator in testimony and the claim of authenticity that has become the guarantor of that subject position. To do so, we explore how the effect of authenticity is produced by certain “metrics,” and how differing “I”-formations—here, composite, coalitional, translated, and negotiated—generate the aura of authenticity a text projects, as well as the imagined relation of readers to personal stories of witness. After tracking the metrics of authenticity in four exemplary texts—“Souad”’s Burned Alive, the Sangtin Collective’s Playing with Fire, Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone, and Dave Eggers’s What is the What?—we suggest an alternative reading practice to “rescue” the reading often associated with testimonial narratives.
Continue reading “Biography, vol. 35, no. 4 (2012)”

EDITORS’ NOTE

ARTICLES

Documenting the Undocumented: Life Narratives of Undocumented Immigrants
Marta Caminero-Santangelo, 449

This essay argues that Underground America, a collection of first-person narratives of undocumented immigrants, advances the premise that the immigrants it represents are already part of the US “nation,” and that their claim to human rights ought therefore to be recognized on the grounds of national belonging.
Continue reading “Biography, vol. 35, no. 3 (2012)”

EDITORS’ NOTE

ARTICLES

“Dust to Cleanse Themselves,” A Survivor’s Ethos: Diasporic Disidentifications in Zeitoun
Valorie Thomas, 271

Extending Jose Muñoz’s analysis of disidentification, this essay argues that Dave Eggers’s Zeitoun reflects a particular ethos of survival that is both decolonized and disidentified. By revising the master media narrative of Hurricane Katrina as an unfortunate act of God and FEMA’s bad timing, Eggers critiques dominant practices of race, class, gender, nation, and crisis processing to address silences at the core of the narrative.
Continue reading “Biography, vol. 35, no. 2 (2012): Between Catastrophe and Carnival: Creolized Identities, Cityspace, and Life Narratives”

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

Post-ing Lives
Gillian Whitlock, v

This special issue of Biography may seem exotic. It engages with a series of concepts that are unusual in studies of life narrative: beginning with zoegraphy and ending with the anthropocene. It turns to scenes of auto/biographical expression that may seem bizarre: animalographies, bioart, narratives of chronic pain, autobiogeography. It embraces creatures, critters, produsers, and avatars. Its critical canon is not traditionally associated with studies of life narrative: Bruno Latour, Deleuze and Guattari, Cary Wolfe, Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Jane Bennett, Neil Badmington, Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben. The critical issues, concepts, and contexts we engage with in this issue, however, are anything but exotic. To the contrary: what it means to be human is a question that is fundamental to autobiographical narrative, and embedded in the history of autobiography in western modernity. Around posthumanism an assemblage of work is emerging that is important for critical work on life narrative now, and the essays in this special issue suggest why this is so.
Continue reading “Biography, vol. 35, no. 1 (2012): (Post)Human Lives”

EDITORS’ NOTE

ARTICLES

“My Eyes Ended Up At My Fingertips”: Antoine, Autobiographical Documentary, and the Cinematic Depiction of a Blind Child Subject
Isabel Pedersen and Kristen Aspevig, 639

Antoine, an independent film by Canadian Laura Bari, gives voice to a blind, five-year-old boy, Antoine Houang, who narrates his life with stories, memories, and imaginative compositions. We argue that because of its basis in collaboration, Antoine extends the genre of autobiographical documentary. It is an autobiography by Houang, but it is also a documentary by Bari. The film uses tactics of each genre to construct a portrait of a blind subject that is enabling rather than constraining. Ultimately, Antoine affords both Houang and Bari the opportunity to create a film that pushes the boundaries of these genres to portray the life of a differently-abled subject who might have been barred from such a practice.

Continue reading “Biography, vol. 34, no. 4 (2011)”

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

Introductory Notes: Performing Queer Lives
Francesca T. Royster, v

How are life writing and queer theory at odds with what we’ve come to expect in autobiographical narratives? The essays in this collection intervene in the traditional project of autobiography by taking as their subject the process of queered meaning making. Continue reading “Biography, vol. 34, no. 3 (2011)”

Editors’ Note, v

ARTICLES

Autographics and the History of the Form: Chronicling Self and Career in Will Eisner’s Life, in Pictures and Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s A Drifting Life
Rocío G. Davis, 253

Using the notion of “autographics,” this essay examines how Will Eisner, in Life, in Pictures (2007) and Yoshihiro Tatsumi, in A Drifting Life (2009), deploy the graphic form to illustrate the development of graphic art, incorporating the story of their artistic trajectory with a critical look at the development of the medium in their time. The texts become exceptional documents that trace the interconnections among politics, society, art, economy, and idealism in the United States and Japan before and after the Second World War.

Continue reading “Biography, vol. 34, no. 2 (2011)”

Introduction: Life Writing as Intimate Publics
Margaretta Jolly, v-xi

This special issue of Biography begins from the US cultural critic Lauren Berlant’s term “intimate public” to explore new constituencies of belonging in relation to life writing and life storying across media. Life writing creates affect worlds, where strangers meet through emotional connection, worlds that are economically and politically dynamic. Continue reading “Biography, vol. 34, no. 1 (2011): Life Writing as Intimate Publics”

Editors’ Note, iii

ARTICLES

American Neoconfessional: Memoir, Self-Help, and Redemption on Oprah’s Couch
Leigh Gilmore, 657

This essay reads the scandal surrounding James Frey’s memoir A Million Little Pieces as part of a developing brand, the American neoconfessional, and questions how memoirs, as part of this brand, present “reading in public” as a mode of civic engagement that teaches readers to consume and judge “similar others.” Continue reading “Biography, vol. 33, no. 4 (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? Continue reading “Biography, vol. 33, no. 3 (2010)”

EDITORS’ NOTE, iii

ARTICLES

Telling the Life Story, Anxiously: The Memoirs of Teresa and Anna Campbell
Judith Lütge Coullie, 309

Continue reading “Biography, vol. 33, no. 2 (2010)”