Designed as a contribution to the field of transnational comparative American studies, this book focuses on gender in life writing that exceeds the boundaries of traditional genres.
The contributors engage with authors who bend genres to speak gender as it manifests in multiple shapes in different geographic locations across the Americas, and especially as it intersects with race and migration, war and colonialism, illness and ageing. In addition to supplying new insights into the established sites of auto/biographical production such as memoir, archive, and oral history, the book explores experimental mixed forms such as selfies, auto-theory, auto/bio comics, and autobiogeography. By combining this multi-genre and multi-media perspective with a multi-generational approach to life writing, the book showcases a spectrum of established and emerging critical voices, many of whom have been influenced by the work of Marlene Kadar, the Canadian life writing scholar whose interventions have expanded the feminist and interdisciplinary methods of life writing studies.
Tracing the intergenerational relay of ideas, this collection fosters dialogue across the western hemisphere, and will be useful to those studying life writing exchanges between North America, Latin America, and the Caribbean. This book was originally published as a special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies.
Table of Contents:
Preface – After Lives: A Reflection on the 2017 IABAA Conference Introduction – Finding Fragments: The Intersections of Gender and Genre in Life Narratives Reflections 1. Cultivating Gullibility 2. Marlene Kadar interview with Sidonie Smith – May 15, 2017 Forum: The Work of Marlene Kadar 3. The Work of Marlene Kadar 4. Mar and Me: Following the Traces 5. Marlene Kadar’s Life Writing: Feminist Theory Outside the Lines 6. Working (with) History: Marlene Kadar and Louise DeSalvo 7. Escape from the Colonial Asylum 8. Inside the Cover, Outside the Archive: Reading the Dispersal of Jane Rule’s Library and Modes of Female Sociability 9. Maternal Stars of the Silent Screen: Gender, Genre, and Photoplay Magazine 10. Unlikely Documents, Unexpected Places: The Limits of Archive 11. Frayed Edges: Selfies, Auschwitz, and a Blushing Emoticon 12. Kim Thúy’s Ru and the Art of the Anecdote 13. Drawing a Narrative Landscape with Women Refugees Essays 14. Translanguaging and Autobiogeography as Decolonial Strategies for Writing Life Narratives within Displacement 15. Sick Women, Sad Girls, and Selfie Theory: Autotheory as Contemporary Feminist Practice 16. Remembering Forgetting: Graphic Lives at the End of the Line 17. Childhood Exile: Memories and Returns 18. Women Making Freedom: Locating Gender in Intra-Caribbean Migration from a Curaçaoan Perspective The Process 19. Rejecting Objectivity: Reflections of a Black Feminist Researcher Interviewing Black Women How Would You Teach It? 20. The Work of Teaching Women’s Auto|Bio Comics
About the Author :
Eva C. Karpinski is an Associate Professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at York University in Toronto, Canada. She is the author of Borrowed Tongues: Life Writing, Migration, and Translation (2012), and co-editor of Trans/Acting Culture, Writing, and Memory (2013). She is currently working on a book project on multilingual life writing.
Ricia Anne Chansky is Professor of Literature at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez. She is co-editor of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, editor of the Routledge Auto/Biography Studies book series, and a Voice of Witness Fellow. She has recent and forthcoming publications on disaster studies, pedagogy, and contested identities.
