Life Writing in the Long Run: A Smith & Watson Autobiography Studies Reader

Acknowledgments and Permissions

We gratefully acknowledge the help of the professional staff at Michigan Publishing Services, particularly our editor savant, Jason Colman; our key idea-person Meredith Kahn; our editor Amanda Karby; and the production staff who facilitated the communication of our work in multiple-format platforms, including print and open-access versions. We depended on the research assistance of two doctoral students at the University of Michigan, Jina Kim and Tiffany Ball, who, while completing their dissertations, helped produce final versions of our previously published essays. Sidonie thanks Sheri Sytsema-Geiger, Key Administrator at the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan, for her attention to permissions obligations. Julia thanks Professor Lesley Ferris for consultation and conversation about autobiographical theatre.

With two exception the essays included in this volume have previously appeared in our collections or journals. We thank the following publishers for permission to include our work here.

a/b: Auto/Biography Studies for the following permissions:

Smith, Sidonie. “Performativity, Autobiographical Practice, Resistance.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 10.1 (January 1995), 17–33.

Biography for the following permissions:

Watson, Julia. “Autographic Disclosures and Genealogies of Desire in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.” Biography 31:1 (Winter 2008), 27–56; Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson. “The Rumpled Bed of Autobiography: Extravagant Lives, Extravagant Questions.” Biography 24.1. (Winter 2001): 1–14; Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson. “Witnessing or False Witnessing? Metrics of Authenticity, I-Formations, and the Ethic of Verification in Testimony,” Biography, 35:4 (Fall 2012), 590–626.

Böhlau Verlag for the following permission: Watson, Julia. “The Spaces of Autobiographical Narrative.” In Räume des Selbst. Selbstzeugnisforschung transkulturell. (Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit 19), ed. Andreas Bähr/Peter Burschel/Gabriele Jancke. Köln/Weimar/Wien: Böhlau, 2007, 13–25.

Brill Publishing for the following permission: Smith, Sidonie. Reprint of “Memory, Narrative, and the Discourses of Identity in Abeng and No Telephone to Heaven.” In Postcolonialism and Autobiography: Michelle Cliff, David Dabydeen, Opal Palmer Adisa, eds. Alfred Hornung and Ernstpeter Ruhe. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi (Brill), 1999, 37–59. By permission of Brill Publications.

mfs: Modern Fiction Studies for the following permission: Sidonie Smith. Adapted from “Re-citing, Re-siting, and Re-sighting Likeness: Reading the Family Archive in Drucilla Modjeska’s Poppy and Sally Morgan’s My Place,” mfs 40 (Fall 1994): 509–542.

Oxford University Press for permission to reuse: Smith, Sidonie. “‘America’s Exhibit A’: Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Living History and the Genres of Political Authenticity.” American Literary History, Fall 2012, 523–42.

The Permissions Company for permission to reuse: Smith, Sidonie. Adapted from “Narratives and Rights: Zlata’s Diary and the Circulation of Stories of Suffering Ethnicity.” In WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 34, Nos. 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2006): 133–152. © 2006 by the Feminist Press at the City University of New York. Used by permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of the publishers, www.feministpress.org. All rights reserved.

The University of Michigan Press for the following permission: Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. “Introduction: Mapping Women’s Self-Representation at Visual/Textual Interfaces,” adapted from Interfaces: Women, Autobiography, Image, Performance. Ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002, 3–22.

The University of Minnesota Press for the following permissions: Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson. “Introduction: De/Colonization and the Politics of Discourse in Women’s Autobiographical Practices,” adapted from De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography, eds. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. 1992, xiii-xxxi; Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. “Introduction.” From Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, eds. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. 1996, 1–24; Watson, Julia. “Ordering the Family: Genealogy as Autobiographical Pedigree,” adapted from Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography. Ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. 1996, 297–323.

The University of Wisconsin Press for the following permissions: Smith, Sidonie. “Human Rights and Comics: Autobiographical Avatars, Crisis Witnessing, and Transnational Rescue Networks.” From Chaney, Michael A., ed., Graphic Subjects. © 2011 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. Reprinted by permission of University of Wisconsin Press; Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. “Introduction: Living in Public.” From Before They Could Vote: American Women’s Autobiographical Writing, 1819–1919. © 2006 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. Reprinted by permission of University of Wisconsin Press; Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. “Introduction: Situating Subjectivity in Women’s Autobiographical Practices.” Adapted from Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader. © 1998 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. Reprinted by permission of the University of Wisconsin Press. While we hold copyright to the following essay, we acknowledge the role of the University of Wisconsin Press in bringing this work to the public: Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Adapted from “Virtually Me: A Toolkit about Online Self-Presentation,” in Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online. Eds. Anna Poletti and Julie Rak. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014. 70–94.

This essay was developed specifically for this volume: “A Personal Introduction to Life Writing in the Long Run.” It is copyrighted by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson.

Though this essay is in preprint form, we acknowledge the role of Lifewriting Annual in preparing it for publication: Watson, Julia. “Parsua Bashi’s Nylon Road: The Visual Dialogics of Witnessing in Iranian Women’s Graphic Memoir.” Copyright Julia Watson. Pre-print for Lifewriting Annual: Biographical and Autobiographical Studies. Forthcoming, New York: AMS Press, 2017.

Taylor & Francis granted permission to reuse the following essays in the print and e-book versions of this book but not the open-access electronic version: Smith, Sidonie. “The Autobiographical Manifesto: Identities, Temporalities, Politics.” Prose Studies 14.2 (September 1991), 186–212; Smith, Sidonie. “Cheesecake, Nymphs, and ‘We the People’: Un/National Subjects about 1900.” Prose Studies 17.1 (April 1994), 120–40; Watson, Julia. “Strategic Autoethnography and American Ethnicity Debates: The Metrics of Authenticity in When I Was Puerto Rican.” Life Writing, 10:2 (June 2013), 129–50.

We also thank the following for permission to use images:

• Images from Parsua Bashi: Nylon Road. Copyright 2006 by Parsua Bashi. Reprinted by permission of Parsua Bashi and Kein & Aber AG, Zürich. All rights reserved.
• Renée Cox and Lyle Ashton Harris: Venus Hottentot 2000, 1995. Courtesy Renée Cox.
• Images from Fun Home: A Family Tragicomedy by Alison Bechdel. Copyright © 2006 by Alison Bechdel. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
• Tracey Emin: “My Bed” 1999. 2016 Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS, London / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
• Audrey Flack: Marilyn (Vanitas) 1977. Courtesy of the artist.
• Mary Kelly: Detail of “Menace” from “Interim, Part I: Corpus” 1984–1985. Laminated photo positive, silkscreen, acrylic on Plexiglas 30 panels: 36" H x 48" W x 2" D each. Courtesy of the artist, Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York.
• Annette Messager: Les Lignes de la main, 1987–88. Overpainted black and white photograph with handwriting on the wall. Courtesy of the Artist and Marian Goodman Gallery.
• Alice Neel: “Self-Portrait” 1980, Oil on canvas. Courtesy of National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution and © Estate of Alice Neel, 1980.
• May Stevens: Rosa Luxemburg and Alice Stevens. From “Rosa, Alice: Ordinary/Extraordinary,” artist’s book, 1988. Courtesy of the artist and RYAN LEE Gallery, New York, New York.
• Yong Soon Min: deColonization, 1991. Courtesy of the artist.