Lives & Letters Mailing: August-September 2016
Dear Colleagues,
Welcome to another Lives & Letters Mailing. This month’s mailing contains information about:
1. Whites Writing Whiteness: Project News
– New Trace! Prosecution for Libel: An 1840 News Item
– New Curiosity! When is a letter? The Manifold Writer, the merchant and the frontier business-woman
– From the Weekly Blog: Gimme a ticket for an aeroplane
– From the Weekly Blog: Leaving no stone unturned!
2. Life Writing, Volume 13, Issue 3, September 2016 is now available online on Taylor & Francis Online
3. Call for Papers – 2017 International Conference on Life Writing: Self-Representation, Medical Narrative and Cultural Memory (9/15/2016; 9/29/30/2017) Taiwan
4. Proposed Seminar for the 2017 Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA)
5. Women’s History Scotland, Fri 9 Sept, Glasgow: Feminisms: Histories, Ideas & Practice
6. Black/White Intimacies: Reimagining History, the South, and the Western Hemisphere (10/1/2016;4/21-22/2017) Alabama, USA
7. Call for Papers – IABA Europe 2017: Life Writing, Europe, and New Media (1/31/2016; 6/7-9/2016) UK
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1. Whites Writing Whiteness: Project News
There are four new items of project news we would like to share this month:
New Trace! Prosecution for Libel: An 1840 News Item
This trace concerns a news item published on 13 May 1840 in the South African Commercial Advertiser which had earlier appeared in the Grahamstown Colonial. It expresses clear approbation for the libel prosecution, taken up by an unnamed Xhosa chief (but perhaps Sarili, successor to Hintsa) because of ‘injury to his character’ – it states, ‘we must express our opinion in favour’. The trace discusses the context in which the account of the case took place, as well as some Eliasian theoretical implications. To read this trace, please visit the website: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/traces/prosecution-for-libel/
New Curiosity! When is a letter? The Manifold Writer, the merchant and the frontier business-woman
The Manifold Writer copying device has been mentioned previously on WWW web pages, in connection with letters written in the 1840s to the Eastern Cape shopkeeper Mrs Harriet Townsend, by a Cape Town import merchant who supplied her with goods, Mr Smith. The act of writing, the act of sending, the act of remembering, are all changed in the age of mechanical reproduction. While digitally there are no longer originals and copies, there can still be simulacra of such. And what riches are revealed about the complexities of gender relations between Harriet Townsend and her merchant advisors! For more, please visit the Curiosity: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/curiosities/when-is-a-letter/
From the Weekly Blog: Gimme a ticket for an aeroplane
On a recent long drive, two songs about letters were sung. One is Leonard Cohen’s ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’, ending ‘sincerely L. Cohen’. The other is Jefferson Airplane’s ‘Gimme a ticket for an aeroplane’, containing the line ‘My baby just wrote me a letter’. This is to recognise that letters are part of the fabric of the everyday, and sometimes they can be invoked and used even when the contents are not told about, and sometimes letter-writers can write at length but in ways which are more about them than the person to whom a letter is addressed. For more, please visit the blog: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/gimme-a-ticket-for-an-aeroplane-sincerely-l-stanley/
From the Weekly Blog: Leaving no stone unturned!
Researchers will undoubtedly do many things in the name of their work, and as luck with have it, one such occasion involved a hunt for a specific bottle of wine. The bottle’s reverse-side label provides the information that English sailors of the 17th century who were en route to the Indies used to put their letters home under particular stones or boulders on South African shores, for the next passing revictualling ship’s sailors going in the other direction to collect and take responsibility for delivering. For more, please visit the blog: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/leaving-no-stone-unturned/
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2. Life Writing, Volume 13, Issue 3, September 2016 is now available online on Taylor & Francis Online
This new issue contains the following articles:
Articles
Life Writing in the Colonial Archives: The Case of Nnamdi Azikiwe (1904–1996) of Nigeria
Stephanie Newell
Pages: 307-321 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2016.1180807
Beyond the Death of the Author: Summertime and J. M. Coetzee’s Afterlives
Donald Powers
Pages: 323-334 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2016.1089095
The Simultaneity of Past and Present in Ian Douglas Smith’s The Great Betrayal: The Memoirs of Ian Douglas Smith (1997)
Cuthbeth Tagwirei
Pages: 335-350 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2015.1073830
Forests of the Self: Life Writing and ‘Wild’ Wanderings
Tanya Y. Kam
Pages: 351-371 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2016.1086290
Reflection
Not/Knot Father: Alzheimer’s, Nonfiction and Writing the Father
Francesca Rendle-Short
Pages: 375-385 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2015.1055705
Reviews
Boom! Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market
Claire Lynch
Pages: 389-391 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2015.1136992
Boom! Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market
Lynn Z. Bloom
Pages: 393-396 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2015.1136993
The Novel: A Biography
Katarzyna Bartoszyńska
Pages: 397-399 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2016.1136552
Antjie Krog: An Ethics of Body and Otherness
Elizabeth Kollmann Adlam
Pages: 401-404 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2016.1136550
Time and tide wait for no man (or woman). Explore the multidisciplinary TIME Collection now.
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IABA-L: A LIST FOR LIFE WRITING
International Auto/Biography Association
sites.google.com/a/ualberta.ca/iaba/home
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3. 2017 International Conference on Life Writing: Self-Representation, Medical Narrative and Cultural Memory
I-Chun Wang, Kaohsiung Medical University
ichunwang316@kmu.edu.tw
Deadline for Abstracts: September 15, 2016
Life writing is a genre and a practice of criticism (Marlene Kadar, 1992) that refers to history, literature, and documentary and includes the sub-genres of memoirs, biography, oral testimonies, diaries, epistolary works and personal narratives. The genre writing has been a favorite one for research in the humanities serving to explore identity formation and inner dialogue with the self as well as with critical transitions, such as cultural adaptation, diaspora, migration, and other traumatic experiences. Life writings are an important resource to understand individuals, communities and the cultural impacts of historical periods. The immediate effects of personal letters and journals disclose the past of individuals and collectives. Research on life writing discovers human values and they address issues on memories, affect, and cultural aspects of identity formation. In the field of psychological sciences, life writing also serves as “scriptotherapy,” that is, the healing power of self-narrative which helps to foster not just self-awareness; it helps traumatized subjects confront the unspeakable past. In philosophy and literature, the examination of one’s life is important, for instance the platonic Socrates urging that the unexamined life is not worth living, Descartes’ idea that I think therefore I am, the exploration of self in Montaigne, the existentialist exploration of self and existence in Kierkegaard, Sartre, Camus and others, the examination of self in the soliloquies of Shakespeare as in Hamlet, the sense of self in the discourses of education and human rights in Montaigne, Locke, Rousseau, Montesquieu and others. Nietzsche questions the traditional sense of self and morality and provokes further debates on that, so that our lives have no one story and that truths are constructed. Feminist philosophers, such as De Beauvoir and Elaine Showalter, challenge the kind of life-writing that men have constructed and try to introduce gender to the debate. The sense of life and the idea of writing are contested. Writing the self or subject has private and public dimension in art, philosophy, medicine and life of people.
The 2017 International Conference on Life Writing will be co-hosted on September 29-30, 2017 by the College of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Center for Cross-Cultural Studies at Kaohsiung Medical University in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. We welcome papers and abstracts in English with a focus on life writing in the Eastern or Western world. For individual proposals, please submit a one-page, double-spaced abstract in English before September 10; for panels, please send presenters’ names and abstracts together before September 15, 2016. For submissions and queries, please contact organizing committee with your short bioblurb at ichunwang316@gmail.com
Suggested but not limited domains include the following:
• Film biography
• War, colony and life writing
• Life writing and illness
• Reading the self and private life
• Life writing and ethnic memory
• Oral history
• Medical narrative
• Letters and censorship
• Life writing in transcultural context
• Politics of life writing
• Emotion and self-narration
• Subjectivity and Imagining the Self
• Writing the self and Others
• (Re)appropriation of life-writing in popular culture
• Collective history and the individual
• Life writing as subjective narratives
• Teaching Life Narratives
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IABA-L: A LIST FOR LIFE WRITING
International Auto/Biography Association
sites.google.com/a/ualberta.ca/iaba/home
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4. Proposed Seminar for the 2017 Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA)
Utrecht University, Netherlands, July 6-9, 2017
Seminar Organizers: Alejandro Zamora, Glendon College, York University
Jocelyn Frelier & Mélissa Gélinas, University of Michigan – Ann Arbor
Coming-of-age in the Contemporary World: New Directions
Bildungsroman, a term used in literary criticism to refer to a novel of formation or education, became widely used near the end of the 19th century to refer to texts in which the protagonist is central and the theme involves his or her development from childhood and/or adolescence to adulthood. From early, classical examples such as Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1796) to more recent, popular iterations such as the Harry Potter series, the coming-of-age story has provided not only an in-depth relationship with the text’s protagonist, but also an understanding of the cultural critiques of the author, examined through the protagonist and his or her peers.
The evolution of the genre is a fascinating one. In many ways, the traditional bildungsroman can be seen as a product of European modernity. As such, it reflects the situated and historical conjuncture that gave rise to the centripetal and exclusionary construction of the nation-state, buttressed by a unitary vision of the subject, her language, her sexuality, her religion, and so on. In contrast, the contemporary bildungsroman has become a de-centered (and at times decolonial and/or post-national), globalized genre that often serves to interrogate the crisis of subjectivity. Initially focused on the teleological development and the social opportunities of a white male protagonist, the bildungsroman now portrays identity formation from a diversity of positionalities and as a contingent, performative, and layered process that is very much influenced by existing and emerging categories, norms, and power relations (Butler 1990; Braidotti 1994; Walker 2001).
This seminar asks: What is the contemporary bildungsroman, and how is it different from classic definitions of the genre? How have the debates and events of the 20th and 21st century shaped the narratives of protagonists whose Bildung (formation process) they affect? As populations grow ever more transient, how does the (dis)connectedness of narrators to their communities of origin influence the story they tell? What is the place of technology in the stories that narrate growing up in today’s world? Finally, while stories of Bildung emerged in the literary, novelistic realm, how have new and older media (e.g., cinema, graphic novel, video games, social media) contributed to redefine the genre?
We welcome proposals on (or related to) the following topics:
• Bildung and/in crisis
• differences in language and/or cultural origin
• technology
• new and older media
• minority status (gender, ethnic, sexual orientation, racial, etc.)
• youth subcultures
• resistance to or attempts to fit the “mainstream”
• new or changing social demands and norms
Interested participants are invited to submit a proposal for a 20-minute presentation. Submissions must be made through the ACLA portal (http://acla.org/seminars) during the submission period (Sept. 1 – Sept. 23, 2016). Seminar organizers will review all submitted papers and propose their rosters to the ACLA by Sept. 30. The ACLA Program Committee will review all submitted seminars for consideration for inclusion in the program in October.
For more information on the ACLA Annual Meeting, see http://www.acla.org/annual-meeting
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IABA-L: A LIST FOR LIFE WRITING
International Auto/Biography Association
sites.google.com/a/ualberta.ca/iaba/home
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5. Women’s History Scotland, Fri 9 Sept, Glasgow: Feminisms: Histories, Ideas & Practice
Registration is now open for this year’s free Women’s History Scotland Annual Conference on Fri 9 Sept 9.00-17.00, at Glasgow Women’s Library, entitled Feminisms: Histories, Ideas & Practice. Speakers explore wide-ranging themes including feminist activism, material and visual cultures, and biographies.
Zoë Fairbairns will give this year’s Sue Innes Memorial Lecture, entitled Five Decades, Five Feminisms.
Further details of this year’s WHS Conference are now posted on the WHS website, including those on free registration which is *now* open on Eventbrite:
If you have any questions please contact the conference organisers at whsconference2016@gmail.com
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6. Black/White Intimacies: Reimagining History, the South, and the Western Hemisphere (10/1/2016;4/21-22/2017) Alabama, USA
Black/White Intimacies: Reimagining History, the South, and the Western Hemisphere
A symposium hosted by the University of Alabama Department of English
April 21-22, 2017, Tuscaloosa, Alabama
More than two centuries after the fact, the sexual relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, enslaved to Jefferson, continues to grip the American historical and literary imagination, manifesting most recently in the April 2016 release of Stephen O’Connor’s historical novel Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings. The novel portrays Jefferson as a compassionate lover and renders Hemings as equally ensnared in the trappings of love and passion. O’Connor’s work, while receiving a good deal of high praise, has been the subject of bitter critique from readers dismayed that the novelist romanticizes the relationship, representing Hemings as a willing participant instead of a rape victim. This criticism is born out of the general perception that few, if any, truly romantic relationships existed between enslaved African Americans and their white masters and mistresses, since the system of slavery and its uneven relations of power precluded possibilities for sincere sentimental connections. The English Department at the University of Alabama is planning a two-day symposium that interrogates this general perception by re-examining models of intimacy across racial lines during the era of slavery and afterwards.
Symposium organizers seek paper proposals from emerging and established scholars whose work engages aspects of interracial intimacy within an American context. The aim of this symposium is to interrogate the ways in which Americans expressed intimacies across racial lines amid the phenomena of New World cross-cultural contact, the transatlantic slave trade and onwards into the 20th century. What were the limitations of interracial intimacies and how might people have addressed those limitations in various settings – domestic spheres, legal systems, religious spaces, classrooms? If people across races and cultures lived, ate, slept, and traveled together, what were the implications for cultural understanding—or lack thereof? What was interracial intimacy and how might expressions of such intimate contact look different given the features of race, gender, and class? We welcome papers that address any era of American cultural history, and we are particularly interested in perspectives that examine time periods before the 20th century.
Possible paper topics might include but are not limited to the following:
• Same sex intimacy across racial lines
• Multicultural intimacies beyond the black/white binary
• Economic intimacies, i.e. business ventures, financial loans from slave to master and vice versa
• Domestic intimacies
• Narrative Intimacy and writers who embody cross-racial consciousnesses
• Interracial intimacies of the (long) Civil Rights Era
• Intimacy in death, i.e. through graveyards and funeral homes
• Medical intimacies, i.e. white doctors/black bodies and vice versa
If interested, please email a one-page CV and 250-word abstract to symposium organizers: Andy Crank (jacrank@ua.edu), Trudier Harris (tharris13@ua.edu), and Cassander Smith (clsmith17@ua.edu). The deadline for submissions is Oct. 1, 2016. Those whose proposals are selected will receive small travel grants to offset the cost of travel and accommodations in Tuscaloosa. If you have questions or need more information, you can address queries to Professors Crank, Harris, and Smith.
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IABA-L: A LIST FOR LIFE WRITING
International Auto/Biography Association
sites.google.com/a/ualberta.ca/iaba/home
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7. Call for Papers – IABA Europe 2017: Life Writing, Europe, and New Media (1/31/2016; 6/7-9/2016) UK
Call for Papers
IABA Europe 2017: Life Writing, Europe, and New Media
The Centre for Life-Writing Research at King’s College London and the European Research Council- Funded ‘Ego-Media’ project are delighted to be hosting the IABA Europe conference in London from the 7th-9th June 2017. The conference will highlight digital and new media. Changes in technologies of information and communication affect our everyday lives, research and teaching: key questions for the conference will be how new media have transformed both lives and life writing. We hope scholars working on other topics and earlier times will find it interesting to explore the transformations the digital is effecting in their fields. We also welcome contributions where the emphasis falls on other concerns of particular urgency for the IABA community – for example conflict, displacement, migration and refugees; women’s lives; LGBT+ lives; issues of national and European identities.
Confirmed speakers include:
• Laurie McNeill, University of British Columbia, Vancouver
• John Zuern, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa
• Sidonie Smith, Mary Fair Croushore Professor of the Humanities and Director, Institute for the Humanities, University of Michigan
• Julia Watson, Professor, Dept. of Comparative Studies, Emerita, The Ohio State University
Topics may include, but need not be confined to, the following:
• Diaries, blogs, vlogs
• The digital everyday
• Digital and literary forms
• Digital arts and life writing
• Social Media platforms
• Migrants’ and refugees’ stories
• Citizenship and the digital
• Life (writing) after Brexit
• Space, place and virtuality/the local and the global
• Digital identities
• European identities
• Archives
• Multimedia lives
• Digital natures
• Health, well-being and the digital self
• The networked self
• Sharing, Liking, and digital agency
• Digitised lives
• Future lives
• Digital violence
• Online abuse/trolling
• Women’s writing
• Trauma
• Crossings
• digital activism and advocacy
• methodologies and histories
• audiences and reading practices
• digital language and languages
• online sociolinguistics
• digital aesthetics and affects
• technology and metaphor: digital metaphors we live by
• performing lives
• virtual creativity
• online (dis)embodiment and (im)materiality
• pedagogy
• pre-digital media — cinema, television, print or manuscript
• economy, austerity, and the digital
• big data /the quantified self
• forms of play
We are also planning to include workshops in which life writing projects or groups can present their work.
Proposals are encouraged including participation by creative practitioners.
Proposals for panels and alternative formats are also welcome. Indeed, we very much want to vary the pattern from groups of 20-minute papers. If you’d be interested in participating in something like a ‘lightning round’ let us know what topic(s) you’d most like to speak about.
Please send proposals to: iaba2017@kcl.ac.uk by 31 January 2017
Clare Brant and Max Saunders, on behalf of the IABA-Europe 2017 Organising Committee
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IABA-L: A LIST FOR LIFE WRITING
International Auto/Biography Association
sites.google.com/a/ualberta.ca/iaba/home
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Last updated: 2 September 2016
