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

Julia on the Unpredictable Consequences of Working on Genealogy

Julia composed her essay on genealogy, “Ordering the Family: Genealogy as Autobiographical Pedigree,” in 1992–3 while a visiting Fulbright professor in Dakar, Senegal. There she often visited Gorée Island, the former detainment station for West Africans being shipped to enslavement in the Americas in the early nineteenth century.

Witnessing the evidence of systematic, brutal enslavement in the barred windows and chains of Gorée’s fortress changed how I thought about claims to genealogical pedigree—the legacy of the victors—and the meanings of migration. My memories of writing in Dakar are inescapably material. I cannot return to that essay without recalling, re-feeling, the texture of daily life at my desk by a window that looked out onto mango trees, where I heard the cries of children at play and the screams of wild birds, and where I had to dust my Mac cube on the desk every day because the fine sand of desertification drifted through the window onto everything. Living in the partly oral culture that Senegal then still was, made clear the colonial inflection of genealogical practice, as it is understood in the West.

Now, however, I also wince at some points on rereading the essay’s certainty about the codified practices of genealogy because of how my own thoughts on that process have changed. In 2004 I became very interested in my Irish family’s genealogy and decided to trace the histories of my two Irish grandmothers, both of whom left for North America at the end of the nineteenth century. The strictures and structures of genealogical research served as guideposts and the Mormon researcher at my local Family History Center was a miracle-worker in locating manifests for ships and clarifying census details. More largely, I am now surprised to see how there has been a revolution in researching and writing family lives as a combination of autobiographical and biographical detail relying on genealogy in collective family stories such as Nancy K. Miller’s intriguing What They Saved: Pieces of a Jewish Past and Shirlee Taylor Haizlip’s wry The Sweeter the Juice: A Family Memoir in Black and White. With digital access the preservation and sharing of family archives has also profoundly changed genealogical practices. And the American public’s interest in television shows about unearthing the genealogies of prominent people, such as Henry Louis Gates’ Finding Your Roots, indicates how accessible not just a sense of the past but the evidence of one has become for everyday users. My 1996 essay underestimated the emotional satisfaction of finding historical information about my ancestors and inventing fuller stories of the lives they might have lived, let alone the possibility of meeting a distant relative still in the birthplace of one of my grandmothers. These satisfactions of developing autobiographical consciousness depended on learning the exacting if imperfect tools of genealogical method that now, through the wonders of DNA research, have become available to those of African, American, and Asian, as well as European, descent.

There were larger implications to thinking about genealogy from Dakar’s locus of slavery and colonization than I foresaw at the time. The question of who speaks for and as whom became a thread guiding many of the texts and topics I chose, not only in essays about some of the first women’s published autobiographical works in Senegal (Nafissatou Diallo’s A Dakar Childhood and Ken Bugul’s The Abandoned Baobab) but also in spurring curiosity about those marginalized by American imperialism, particularly Native Americans. I have never written the book on autoethnography that thinking about genealogy stirred me to, as the political sensitivities around a woman of privilege discussing “others” make for fraught conversations. But I am now persuaded that it is important to begin with a concept of “counter-ethnography” and address the exclusionary ethnographic norms and strictures that prevailed at the moment of “interviewer-informant” encounters.

When I look back, I also note my fatal curiosity about the work of “lesser” women writers—forgotten ones like Mary Arnold and Mabel Reed, Montana women writers not known beyond the Rockies like Mary MacLane and Janet Campbell Hale, quirky visual artists like Bobby Baker and Parsua Bashi, and well-known but idiosyncratic ones like Charlotte Salomon and Patti Smith. Engaging with outliers has been a sustaining pleasure for me.

Sidonie on Rereading Her Past Writing

In reading over these essays I am taken back to their places of composition. There was the office in the Department of Gender Studies and Social Analysis of the University of Adelaide in Australia, where I wrote the essay included here on Sally Morgan’s My Place and Drusilla Modjeska’s Poppy, two very different life writing texts published in 1987 and 1990 respectively. I began reading Australian life writing in a haphazard manner to familiarize myself with works that were part of the burgeoning canon of settler literary culture in Australian life writing. A favorite of mine was Albert Facey’s A Fortunate Life (1981); I also read numerous works of oral history, autoethnography, and testimony written by Australia’s indigenous peoples, survivors of what has become known as The Stolen Generation. When I returned home I carried a memento of those months spent reading, exploring, and composing: a large lithograph print of a mother and child by Sally Morgan, who was a graphic artist as well as a writer. It now hangs in my living room, a constant reminder of my time in Australia—the literature I read, the friends I made, and the ongoing struggles of indigenous peoples in the long, sordid histories of settler societies.

At times I also recall the conditions of an essay’s composition. While rereading an essay we decided not to include, I found myself captured by the illness that had kept me in bed as I composed and sent off that essay to be read by a generous volunteer at a conference on “material selves.” Having the idea for an intriguing essay was the easy part; the hard part involved trying to sit up and write with as much polish as I could muster while my body endured five days of fever. The thought of that moment makes me feel queasy all over again.

At other times, how unfamiliar my scholarly voice seems. It isn’t that I don’t recognize the shape of the sentences, the particular idioms of theorizing, the points toward which I was driving. It is the certainty in the argument, a certainty that belies the labor of essay writing and the sense of despondency in trying to find a point of repose at the end of a piece. It is also the sense that, at that point in time, I knew something about a set of issues or a constellation of texts or a theoretical conundrum that now entirely eludes my memory.

Returning to particular essays also conveyed me backwards in time to sites of sociality that punctuate my history in the field of autobiography studies. Rereading essays returned me to the scenes of the conferences at which I presented them. Those conferences were consistently conversational occasions, opportunities to meet writers and scholars of life writing from around the world. I returned three times to Mainz, Germany, at the invitation of Alfred Hornung, literally the German “dean” of American Studies and the mentor to several generations of scholars now working in life writing studies throughout Germany. I have similarly warm memories of the biennial meetings of the International Auto/Biography Studies Association in Beijing, Melbourne, Sussex, Honolulu, Canberra, Banff, and other global locations. Given the hard slog of carving out a place for the purposeful study of life writing in academia, these meetings of a generous, welcoming community composed of established and emerging scholars forged networks, spawned three regional associations—for Europe, the Pacific, the Americas—, and provided generous mentors for graduate students. I am thankful for all of them.

Introductions to Our Collections

The pleasure of revisiting our co-written introductions to four collections of essays and an anthology of short autobiographical essays by nineteenth-century American women writers is of a different sort. Our first co-edited volume, De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography (1992) had the excitement of a project that was at the time without precedent because so little autobiographical writing by women had been accorded international recognition. Ironically it would now be an impossibly large project to revisit, given the explosion of women’s postcolonial life writing around the world and the need to more fully stipulate specific colonial histories in regions of the world where neocolonial practices stubbornly persist or fundamentalist regimes have been installed.

Our second edited collection, Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography (1996), ranged wildly and widely. Yet the argument of its introduction, that we move in and out of multiple versions of our life scripts on a regular basis, now seems prescient for theorizing everyday life and the uses of social media. Its essays came from contributors in fields ranging from communication to political science, and took up topics such as Alcoholics Anonymous narratives and personal ads that have become a staple of cultural studies.

Our third introduction, to Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader (1998), was the compression of a book, which we did not have the time or occasion to write, concerning the retrieval and production of women’s autobiographical writing since the inception of Second Wave feminism. We both came of age in the late sixties and, like many women graduate students, wondered why there were not models and theories that aligned with our own experience. At the same time, by the nineties we wanted to critique the notion of “women’s experience” as an essentialist simplification. The thirty-nine previously published essays that we gathered chart a kind of dialectical history on topics in feminist theory that influenced not only the field of women’s, but of all, autobiography studies. Its scope included concepts such as memory, experience, performativity, displacement, ethnic- and class-based self-construction, collectivized subjectivities, alternative genres, voices, and sexualities, and the pedagogy and practice of autobiographical writing—topics that now signal the wide range of our field.

For our fourth collection, Interfaces: Women, Autobiography, Image, Performance (2002), we wrote an introduction that involved a disciplinary stretch into life narratives that were not, or not only, in writing: self-portraits in painting, installation, sculpture, or performance. A challenging task both to organize and to theorize, the book taught us much about the frames of disciplinary parameters and modes of inquiry at a time when women artists were actively breaching those boundaries. We aimed to develop a systematic model for reading at what we call the visual-verbal interface of autobiographical acts and apply its lens to a wide range of women’s strategies for self-presentation: as parallel or interrogatory, documentary or ethnographic, paratextual or palimpsestic, telescoped or serial. While such autobiographical acts cannot be fully schematized, the model suggests that they are by no means just transparent “expressions”; rather, they are complex and inventive projects engaging both the materiality of the body and the affordances or limits of various media.

Before They Could Vote: American Women’s Autobiographical Writing, 1819–1919 (2006), our only venture into assembling a collection of autobiographical texts, involved lesser-known women’s writing from the American “long nineteenth century” to the advent of women’s suffrage in the United States. As we discovered how little we knew about everyday life writers of the past, the book became a conversation with some formerly excluded margins of autobiography studies.

Our collaborative collections would not have been possible without the active support of many editors, above all William L. Andrews and Craig Howes. Bill’s encouragement over these decades, as he listened to the many possible projects we cooked up, was contagious and sustaining; and his passion for recovering the buried past of life writing, coupled with his encyclopedic knowledge of African American slave narratives evidenced in To Tell a Free Story, was inspiring. Craig’s energy for organizing Biography, the preeminent journal in the field, as well as the IABA listserv, and the Center for Biographical Research at the University of Hawaii, has helped transform life writing into a global field and generated many occasions where we found inspiration for our own new projects. Our co-authored book, Reading Autobiography: A Guide to Interpreting Life Narratives, one hundred and fifty pages longer in its second edition (2010) than its first (2001), depended on the conversancy we gained over the years with a wide range of texts, scholars, and issues. In retrospect, our collections were a kind of autodidactic exercise. Like many others, we had to discover and excavate the field before we could map it—and, as we know, maps are temporally contingent and always incomplete and inadequate to the terrain.

Collaborative Essays

The story was somewhat different with our collaborative essays, a form that we have turned to in recent years when the sheer demands of time and energy required to produce a book across two states and in competition with our other interests and the demands of our jobs led us to compress Big Ideas into essay-length discussions that we hoped would be informative and provocative. Indeed, in recent years one of the most important contributions that scholars of life writing can make has seemed to be raising questions—about the settled canons of literature departments, the schemes and structures of narrative methodologies, the hierarchy of cultural modes for negotiating issues in the world.

The first non-introductory essay we co-authored, “The Rumpled Bed of Autobiography” (2001), was occasioned by an unsettling experience that we shared in London while viewing Tracey Emin’s “My Bed,” a finalist for the distinguished Turner Prize. To see a “life” presented as the material detritus of an actual body moving through a decade of experience that had obsessed her brought home a sense of the contradictory stakes of autobiographical work—as both careful self-scrutiny and, at times with Emin, flagrant narcissism. “My Bed” seemed a metaphor for a field of study that, in the wake of the “memoir boom,” could no longer be contained within the neat critical prescriptions of earlier generations of life writing scholars. Assertions of the personal were exploding across multiple media and wreaking havoc with the norms of what retrospective self-study was supposed to be, and do. (As this suggests, part of our pleasure in over three decades of studying life writing has been the excitement of seeing new possibilities emerge.)

“Witnessing or False Witnessing? Metrics of Authenticity, I-Formations, and the Ethic of Verification in Testimony” (2012) was a different kind of collaborative venture, one that attempted to engage with the phenomenon of hoaxes that have rarely been absent from autobiographical practice but have acquired new energy and global scope with the memoir boom and the ease of online research. While we initially wanted to chart the varieties of hoax memoir, we came to realize that producing a taxonomy of imposture could suggest that these were aberrations in need of policing—an abhorrent thought. What was happening was far more interesting as a manifestation of the complex politics of witnessing in an age when testimony has both new currency and new problems. That we would come to see “authenticity” as a troubling claim in autobiographical presentation was a measure of how far the field has come in complicating simple notions of the rhetoric of self-presentation.

We vowed that “Virtually Me: A Toolkit about Online Self-Presentation” (2014), our tentative foray into digital media of self-presentation, would be a “one and done,” as the field of online life narrative belongs to younger generations more adept with Instagram and Snapchat. But it was uncanny to discover the applicability of not just the terminology but also the concerns of autobiographical theory for aspects of new social media. We were also intrigued by how these concerns can break down as automedia propose and compose new formations that depend on digital affordances and demand new theories of algorithms and platforms. Our essay’s “toolkit” offers readers a means to arm themselves against the seductive slide into reading digital self-presentation as transparent, identical with the biography of the author. Rather, the pleasures of the “toolkit” questions may provide points of departure for provocative conversations with virtual others, looking at a subject now through this lens, now that one.

Solo Essays

Of course each of us also developed our own projects and lines of inquiry, at times diverging into quite different areas, which we loosely group in the rubrics below.

Autoethnography

Although the term “autoethonography” has been employed for decades, there is surprisingly little concurrence on defining its practices and audiences, and a paucity of scholarship directly engaging it as a form. The term may seem transparent: autos signals the individual I; ethnos the group or socius; and graphein the act of writing. But just as with autobiography, the apparently prescriptive Greek words are subject to differing and controversial interpretations.

A focus on the role of ethnography has characterized debates about qualitative ethnography that have stimulated—and vexed—the social science disciplines since the 1980s. From the perspective of anthropology, it is a practice that inscribes the participant observer in the scene of field research and observation, making the autoethnographic possible. But by the mid-nineteen-eighties the concept of participant observation had become deeply problematic and paradoxical for scholars such as James Clifford, George Marcus, and Clifford Geertz, who critiqued the notion of “objective” observation of a group and challenged the transparency of the information given by “informants.” In different ways, their provocative challenges implicate debates about the nature of anthropology, the project of fieldwork and field notes, and the site and perspective of observation. While taking autoethnography as a viable category has generated some engaging studies in the social sciences, such as those edited by Deborah Reed-Danahay, the concept is in our view still inadequately theorized as a reflexive praxis. Locating autoethnography as a practice of life writing spanning the social sciences and the humanities—and arguably the arts—promises to shift the focus of past debates.

From the point of view of life-writing studies, many narratives of the developing world are autoethnographic texts in which writers narrate their development of an interior consciousness in cultures shifting from an oral, group-based formation that place less value on interiority and introspection to written—print and digital—texts that “discipline” the subject’s self-study in a Foucauldian sense. In such moments of transition, narrating “I”s may link the story of their growth as individuals to the changes in their social groups at moments of sociopolitical transformation, thereby complicating or undermining the Bildungsroman narrative on which so many western coming-of-age autobiographies rely. Understandably, writers in nonwestern countries and the global South have contended that ethnography often serves as a site or practice of the “master’s house” of western scholarship that should be rejected or parodied. In autoethnographic narratives the categories for representing social organization that may have derived from anthropologists, missionaries, political scientists, or colonial governments become rubrics for describing a local world and critiques of cultural domination. In this sense, such narratives might more appropriately be considered counter-ethnographic. That focus—on how the autobiographical Bildungsroman is revised when personal narrators situate themselves in ethnographic surrounds in the afterlife of colonial regimes—could drive new investigations in life writing of the developing world.

Autofiction

Autofiction has long been regarded as a distinct genre of the autobiographical in the Franco-Belgian-Quebecois tradition, and has gained traction in Germanic contexts.

It is usually understood as a genre working the boundary of “fact” and “fiction” by eliding distinctions between the authorial narrator and the fictional character, while engaging non-fictional elements such as references to contemporaneous historical events.

French author-scholar Serge Doubrovsky, who has written both autofictional works and theoretical studies, coined the term in 1977, in a challenge to Philippe Lejeune’s foundational work on demarcating the autobiographical pact and Gerard Genette’s genre-mapping narratological studies. To situate autofiction as a boundary-crossing form, however, Doubrovsky defines autobiography narrowly as a kind of total and coherent factual reportage about its author. The concept of a deeper, intersubjective “truth” is reserved for what he regards as the transgressive mode of autofiction, which, he asserts, requires a different reconstruction of events than autobiography’s: “Unlike autobiography, which explains and unifies . . . autofiction doesn’t perceive someone’s life to be a whole. It is only concerned with separate fragments, with broken-up chunks of existence, and a divided subject who doesn’t coincide with him- or herself” (Doubrovsky, cited in Jones 176).

But critics of life writing might well ask in what sense autofiction’s “fictionality” differs from the many genres of the autobiographical that engage with referentiality yet do not claim to be identical with “fact,” and may emphasize their use of fictional techniques such as dialogue, characterization, and metaphor to problematize the factual and thematize indeterminacy. In France since the mid-twentieth century many works have been read as autofiction, including the novellas of Marguerite Duras and the narratives of Sophie Calle and Annie Ernaux, all of whose works in English translation have been discussed as autobiographical. In the American tradition much work with autobiographical allusions has been dubbed “metafiction,” including novels by such writers as Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, and Bret Easton Ellis, and what Truman Capote called his “faction,” In Cold Blood, strategically deploying the third person. But the work of, for example, Dave Eggers suggests that the concept of “autofiction” may be insufficient for the encounters of biographical fact, historical events, and personal narration that he stages in such works as What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. (See our discussion of the first in “Witness or False Witness?” and the second in “The Rumpled Bed” in this volume.) Similarly “autofiction” is an inadequate concept for the six volumes of Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, which astonishingly seems to exhibit total recall of details of the past yet is also a sustained meditation on the meaning of events by an authorial figure writing a book that shuttles between present and past times of narration.[3]

In practice, critics of the autobiographical engage with a wide range of life writing genres, some of which take up texts and practices that involve pseudonymous characters, such as Michelle Cliff’s Abeng and No Telephone to Heaven, Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, and the narratives of Paul Auster and Ruth Ozeki. In so doing they are responding to the proliferating modes of self-narration since the later twentieth century that directly engage the autobiographical, both its affordances and its seeming limitations. Whether a concept of “autofiction” enhances this discussion, or merely blurs it, remains to be seen. It may be helpful for scholars to put various definitions of “autofiction” from different national literary traditions into conversation to explore how the wide-ranging enactments of life writing discussed by scholars in the Anglo-American tradition over the past two decades play out in other contexts.

Such discussions could open up more extensive conversations between narrative theorists and autobiography scholars than currently occur. Certainly, using concepts from narratology such as focalization, diegesis, and homodiegetic narration could enhance our understanding of texts. But we have found that the taxonomy of narratology does not map seamlessly onto the dynamics of acts and practices in life writing. The heterogeneous modes and media of the autobiographical require recognition of its different limits and audiences, as well as attention to issues of referentiality and verification that have rarely been theorized in narrative studies. But is propounding a special meta-category of “autofiction,” with its focus on the blurring or disruption of ontological and illocutionary boundaries between narrative worlds, the way to accomplish this? Will it enable new readings of autobiographical narratives as characterized by a radically different pact between narrators and readers than the pact of verisimilitude mobilized in fiction?[4] Determining whether “autofiction” enables, or disables, the theorizing of life writing remains in dispute.

Automedial Lives

An immense world of online life writing has developed in the wake of Web 2.0, as special issues of the journal Biography and the recent collection, Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online, attest. Indeed, Julie Rak argues that scholars need to rethink what happens to “life” and “writing” in automedia, “the enactment of a life story in a new media environment” (155). Grounding the analysis of life writing only in print forms is no longer adequate for mapping the different circuits, platforms, algorithms, paratexts, and seductive solicitations of online forms. At a moment when some scholars continue to discuss selves presented online as transparent and fixed entities, those of us versed in life writing theory can offer tools for a more nuanced understanding of the terms, processes, practices, and stakes of self-presentation.

Of course there are many modes of automediality besides the digital. The rich intersection of what Timothy Dow Adams memorably called “light writing” with life writing continues to be intriguing and vexing in a new generation of photo-memoirs. More generally, visual-verbal collages in their palimpsestic density invite reading practices that meld the methods of several disciplines, as Sarah Brophy and Janice Hladki suggest in considering how visualizations of the autobiographical emphasize the politics of embodiment. Indeed, flexible, heterogeneous theoretical frames are required to engage with the multimodal reflexivity of artists as challenging and politically engaged as William Kentridge, Ai Weiwei, Kerry James Marshall, and South African sculptor Jane Alexander.

The role of the autobiographical in live performance, and its video afterlife, is another rich area for theorizing. The work of such early twentieth-century performers as Valeska Gert, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, and the Dadaists has been “rediscovered” as innovatively autobiographical. The increasing scholarship on performance art in the latter twentieth and twenty-first centuries by such artists as Carolee Schneeman, Marina Abramovic, Chris Burden, Spalding Gray, Joseph Beuys, Laurie Anderson, Stelarc, Bobby Baker, Deb Margolin, Peggy Shaw, and Robbie McCauley offers new arenas for thinking about “live” self-presentation, both solo and ensemble. In Lives in Play: Autobiography and Biography on the Feminist Stage (2014), for instance, Ryan Claycomb, takes up the formalist and narratological strands related to the performer’s body and the embodied version of the self performed in the work of feminist performance artists such as Holly Hughes and Karen Finley. Performance art has also become a means for the global circulation of self-presentation in China, Latin America, Russia, and Eastern Europe.

Autobiographical theater is another challenging arena for life writing scholarship and one that poses intriguing issues. Although the names of characters rarely coincide with that of the author, there may be striking biographical parallels. Theorizing how to discuss what comprises the autobiographical in drama, however, requires thinking about how production effects, physical settings, human voices, and audience interaction inflect the dramatist’s self-presentation. The work of various playwrights, including Eugene O’Neill, Adrienne Kennedy, Sarah Kane, and Alice Childress, invites exploration, as would the work of many European and African dramatists, depending on how the staging of the autobiographical is theorized.

Empathy and Ethics

Work at the intersection of life writing and human rights has stirred up another set of issues: How to frame the concept of empathetic identification? What are the conditions and limits of the role of empathy and empathetic identification for an ethics of reading life stories? How do autobiographical acts, with their assertion of the call, compulsion, and power to speak construct the reader as a secondary witness to experiential histories of radical injury and harm? How do they solicit, compel, or interrupt particular kinds of reading? How do they enter global circuits of witnessing? What do they request of readers, or expect of them? How do readers feel as they read, hear, or view acts of witnessing? What do others expect them to feel?

Soliciting, recording, editing, translating, and publishing first-person witness accounts of the violent denial of rights, as defined through human rights protocols, instruments, and claims, is a fraught enterprise. Heterogeneous acts of witnessing are released into reading publics near and far, familiar or unfamiliar with the contexts of telling. The “trafficking” in memoir, as Gillian Whitlock provocatively observed in Soft Weapons, is troubled by the acute asymmetry between the subject positions of those who witness and those who read, a distance often stretching from the Global South to the Global North. These routes of memoir mobility affect whose stories get told and which story forms and plots are credited by readers and publics with “authenticity” or inauthenticity. And these trafficked texts and performances can be mobilized as “soft weapons” in the arena of geopolitics, as Whitlock argues for life writing from the Middle East circulated in the global North post-9/11. All these conditions contaminate the sense of what empathetic identification is and why we do or don’t value it as an ethical responsibility. As G. Thomas Couser probingly asks, “how can we guarantee, or at least try to ensure, that representation serves the best interests of vulnerable subjects generally?” (19). Or, as one of Sidonie’s students queried in an essay on empathy, what does it mean to theorize an ethics “with empathy, without empathy, and beyond empathy”?[5] Fundamentally, are particular story forms required to activate empathetic identification? Can witness projects expose systemic violence and degradation? Or are they always expected to tell stories of the individual grit of the survivor or play on the sentimentalizing of victimization to unloose readers’ purses? What modes of posthuman witnessing may become compelling to future readers and publics?

Human Rights and Witnessing

Issues of memory, witnessing, and their psychic effects have been central to two decades of critical and theoretical exploration in Holocaust and genocide studies. Approaches to personal witnessing within trauma studies are often framed through a psychoanalytic lens of belatedness that is attentive to the temporal disjunction of repressed memory, ethically motivated by the recognition of the pain of telling as re-traumatization, and revealing about the position of the reader as secondary witness and the teller/witness as distanced in a postmemory moment (Hirsch). But how do such perspectives understand the stakes of the production, circulation, and reception of autobiographical acts attached to the project of witnessing histories of radical violence and harm and the setting forth of rights claims?

Much activity in the arena of human rights scholarship could be brought to bear specifically on both recent and older life writing. Since 2000, Holocaust scholars centrally invested in memory studies have joined other scholars exploring the intersection of cultural formations and human rights institutions, discourses, and politics. They explore how cultural forms circulate within a human rights regime constituted by the formal institutions of the United Nations, nation-state-based commissions, the extensive networks of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), and the unpredictable activities of individuals and groups calling attention to sites, conditions, and the actors involved in human rights violations around the globe. Sidonie, with Kay Schaffer, has explored the intersection of human rights and literary forms including life writing in Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition. Hillary L. Chute’s recent Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and the Documentary Form examines how the form of comics, making its “marks” within frames and gutters, has potential to provocatively document, bear witness to, and engage readers in projects of secondary witnessing. Gillian Whitlock’s current work, most recently in “Black Sites and Grey Zones: 21^st Century Testimony,” has turned attention to the “testimony of things,” asylum seekers, and black sites. These new directions suggest avenues that might be opened up in further projects on human rights and witnessing.

Relationality

“Relationality” is a concept employed with increasing frequency in critical writing and as a conference theme in autobiography studies. But what is this apparently transparent concept—a practice, a disposition, a thematic, or something else? Although the concept has been invoked for over three decades, much in its usage remains slippery. One option is to see relationality as a separate genre, the strategy employed by feminist scholars in the seventies and eighties. The term was applied to accounts of women’s experience and ego formation through what were termed “fluid boundaries,” as our introduction, “Situating Subjectivity in Women’s Autobiographical Practices,” discusses in detail. While relationality became a cornerstone of feminist theorizing about women’s difference that was enabling for the rise of critical work on women’s autobiography, the distinction now seems essentialist, western-focused, and, in a time of gender fluidity, untenable.

As many have since observed, there is a relational aspect to most life writing. A second option, therefore, is to view relationality as a particular mode of autobiographical storytelling that is sometimes engaged throughout an entire narrative. In 1999 both Paul John Eakin and Susanna Egan published excellent books on autobiographical practice that introduced concepts of relationality as a specific formation of other-related life writing. Eakin asserted that relational life writing is “the autobiography of the self and the biography and the autobiography of the other” (58), while Egan focused on dual-authored or generated narratives that oscillated between subjects who were in some sense “mirror lives” to each other. A few years later Nancy K. Miller encapsulated that view in proposing that relationality is not itself a genre but a negotiation among genres: “The challenge that faces autobiographers is to invent themselves despite the weight of their family history, and autobiographical singularity emerges in negotiations with this legacy” (“Entangled” 543).

A third option is to view relationality as a mode of life writing that arose in the later twentieth century as an alternative to traditional “autobiography.” German scholar Anne Rüggemeier’s recent book proposes this view of relationality and details schema for its kinds, the communicative contexts in which it arises, and a set of recent Anglophone texts that exemplify different modes of the relational. Rüggemeier’s study is provocative, if troubling for its postulation of a new universalist binary between “autobiography” and “relational” narrative.[6]

Self-translation

For decades there have been case studies and cultural studies of the politics of language and the networks, transits, and public imaginaries constituted in postcolonial and settler nations where former colonial languages dominate, sometimes intertwined with créoles. Indeed, the relationship of the language of self-presentation to acts of remembering, narrations of experiential history, and negotiations of culturally legible identities remains an important topic in life writing studies, foregrounded in the comparative work of such critics as Françoise Lionnet, Mary Besemeres, and Bella Brodzki. Now, with increased migration and the global circulation of memoirs and other genres of life writing, some multi-lingual writers are self-translating their autobiographical narratives. They thereby become agents who produce their self-presentations “in other words” and as a plurality of texts rather than a single text. As the meta-questions generated about acts and practices of self-translation are taken up by scholars in life writing studies from Europe, the Americas, the Middle East (especially Israel), and Asia, several journals have dedicated issues to this rapidly growing subfield of self-translation, its strategies and rationales, and its history in life writing.[7] Thorny questions arise: Can self-translating life writers be said to be writing the “same” text in different languages? Are they representing the “same” self? When the narrating “I” speaks and writes in at least two languages and represents a narrated “I” with a complex relationship to language shaped by experience of multiple cultures and, in some cases, geographies, what does her or his linguistic identity become? Self-translation involves doubled acts of writing: in the first text the narrating “I” may engage in meta-commentary on the pressures, effects, and efficacies of telling a life; in the translation of that first version, the narrating “I” is joined to—or shadowed by—a translating “I” who may remain implicit or become an explicit commentator on the text’s multiple temporalities. While in one sense, self-translators narrate the same events at least twice, in another sense the lapse of time from the writing the first text to completing a self-translation suggests that these may be successive versions of a life rather than the same version.

Indeed, some self-translators pose this relationship as a linguistic conundrum. For such bi- or multi-lingual writers, contestations around identity are a given, as self-narration is inevitably shaped by the language in which it is presented. A preeminent example is Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. An Autobiography Revisited, which was, in his words, a “re-Englishing of a Russian re-version of what had been an English re-telling of Russian memories in the first place” (“Foreword,” 12). Writers such as Samuel Beckett, Ariel Dorfman, Julien Green, Nancy Huston, Jorge Semprún, Esmeralda Santiago, and Eva Hoffmann have alluded to the conflicts that arose as they shuttled between cultures, experiencing different inflections of identity in different languages and locations. Questions of transnational memory, the relationship of self-reinvention to self-censorship, and the métissage of indigenous and colonial languages in self-translation are among the issues that future scholars might fruitfully explore.