Lives & Letters Mailing: January 2017

Lives & Letters Mailing: January 2017

 

Dear Colleagues,

A very happy New Year from all of us at the Whites Writing Whiteness Project, and welcome to another Lives & Letters Mailing. This month’s mailing contains information about:

1. Whites Writing Whiteness: Project News
New Thinking with Elias! The temporal order, events and social change
– New Working Paper: The settler woman
– New Trace: Transvaal Supreme Court, 1902
– From the Blog: Happy New Year
– From the Blog: Discussions of the Henry Frances Fynn letters
– From the Blog: Conferences
– From the Blog: Keynote at Women’s History in the Digital World Conference 2017
– From the Blog: Elizabeth Price letters
– Coming soon: New area of the website
2. A New book — Understanding Biographies, On Biographies in History and Stories in Biography
3. CFP Photography and the Histories of Working Peoples and Laboring Lives 2/1/2017) Radical History Review
4. (Re) Constructing Lives: Annual Conference of the SAES Workshop of the Biography Society (1/20/2017; 6/1-3/2017) France
5. European Journal of Life Writing Vol V 2016
6. “Family Letters in Early America” (3/15/2017; 1/4-7/2018) MLA New York City
7. The Stories We Tell: Forceful Discourses and The Veracity of Narrative(s) (2/17/2017) USA

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1. Whites Writing Whiteness: Project News

There are nine new items of project news we would like to share this month:

1. New Thinking with Elias! The temporal order, events and social change

This new instalment of ‘Thinking with Elias’ explores questions of ‘social change’. The aim here is to sketch out a framework that can underpin the WWW approach to analysing changes in the representational order with regard to matters of race and ethnicity. From an Eliasian point of view, what is social change and how should it be measured, in what areas of social life and to what extent does it have to occur to be seen as ‘change’, how and why does it happen at the micro-level, and in what particular contexts or circumstances, and are there different kinds of transitions involved at different time-periods as well as in different locations? To read more, please visit the ‘Thinking with Elias’ page: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/thinking-with-elias/the-temporal-order-events-and-social-change/

2. New Working Paper: The settler woman

This working paper explores concerns the remaining business papers of a widowed ‘settler woman’ who married into the Eastern Cape Pringle family, Harriet Townsend nee Hockly. After sketching the background of the Eastern Cape frontier towns, considering the dearth of research on settler colonial women in South Africa, and commenting on the silence about ‘race’ in these documents, the discussion examines two particular aspects. Firstly, who and what was a successful entrepreneur? And secondly, when does ‘a letter’ begin and end in relation to any other writing it is attached to or part of?

The working paper can be accessed via the following link: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/files/2016/11/Stanley-2016-Settler-Woman-Business.pdf

3. New Trace: Transvaal Supreme Court, 1902

This Trace concerns a document in the JS Marwick Papers, held in the Killie Campbell Library in Durban. More precisely, it is a certificate of qualification regarding John Sydney Marwick’s competence to act as a Sworn Translator in two languages. The certificate provides a series of statements which just ‘are’ and there are no signs of them being addressed to anyone in particular, indeed to anyone at all. How does it achieve its authority? This and other such interesting questions are explored. To read more, please visit the Trace: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/traces/supreme-court-transvaal-13-nov-1902/

4. From the Blog: Happy New Year

Officially the Whites Writing Whiteness ended 31 December 2016. Literally, the project proceeds as usual to 31 March 2017, when its final report is due. To read more on this, please visit the blog: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/a-new-years-blog/

5. From the Blog: Discussions of the Henry Frances Fynn letters

Henry Francis Fynn (1803-1861) was variously a trader, Resident Agent, Diplomatic Agent and Resident Magistrate in Natal, Pondoland (Eastern Cape) and then in Natal again. A two-part blog series describes the Fynn collections and also discusses particularities of how to work with them. To read the series, please visit the blog:

Part 1: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/assemblages-absences-and-heterotopias-the-henry-francis-fynn-letters-part-1/

Part 2: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/instantiations-and-ontologies-part-2-of-the-henry-francis-fynn-letters/

6. From the Blog: Conferences

Our Tracing the Trace conference took place on 13 January and is the first of three organised around the clarion-call made in The Archive Project (Moore, Salter, Stanley & Tamboukou, Routledge, August 2016). The second will take place on 13 March at the University of East London – with registration closing on 6 March.

To view the call for papers and registration info for the forthcoming second conference, Power of the Metaphorical (13 March), please visit the blog: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/power-of-the-metaphorical-in-archive-research-paper-call/

For some remarks concerning the first conference, Tracing the Trace (13 January), please visit the blog: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/tracing-the-trace/

7. From the Blog: Keynote at Women’s History in the Digital World Conference 2017

We at Whites Writing Whiteness are pleased to announce that Liz Stanley will be one of the two keynote speakers at the forthcoming ‘Women’s History Digital World’ Conference taking place from 6-7 July at Maynooth University, Ireland. Please visit the blog for more details and also to view the call for papers (with a 28 February deadline): http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/womens-history-in-the-digital-world/

8. From the Blog: Elizabeth Price letters

The letters by Elizabeth ‘Bessie’ Price, daughter of Mary Smith Moffat and Robert Moffat and wife (as of 1861) of Roger Price, are located in the Cory Library in Grahamstown. They are among the most interesting that have been encountered in the process of carrying out Whites Writing Whiteness research. Some of Bessie Price’s preoccupations may now in race terms seem mistaken, distasteful or odd. One way to get a fuller measure of Bessie Price is through how she was seen by others. There was an occasion when one LMS missionary wrote to another that he had seen Roger Price and pitied him because his wife was no true Christian but more of a theist or Buddhist. He clearly disapproved, while her holistic, theistic, vegetarian and whole earth approach is likely to strike more of a spark with today’s readers. To read more, please visit the blog: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/elizabeth-price-letters-genre-busting/

9. Coming soon: New area of the website

Regular visitors to the Whites Writing Whiteness website may have noticed a small change… There has recently been an addition to ‘The Hub’ area called ‘Archives & Collections’, where we will shortly be providing information regarding each of the collections we’ve been working on as well as the archives these collections are located in. Keep an eye on this, as we will be adding such info in the near future: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/thehub/collections-and-archives/

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2. A New book — Understanding Biographies, On Biographies in History and Stories in Biography

On Biographies in History and Stories in Biography

Birgitte Possing

In modern and postmodern times, biography is one of the most popular genres of the day. All around the Western world, we are engaged in the lives of ordinary and well-known people, and biographies fly off the shelves. In Understanding Biographies, the Danish historian and biographer Birgitte Possing uncovers the essence of biography as a genre, spanning a number of radically different types of life-storytelling. She defines biography as a genre, a narrative form and an analytic field, providing guidelines to an understanding of gender, archetypes, narrative traditions, critique and ethics of the field.

Understanding Biographies is not a cookery book with just one recipe for ‘how to write a biography’. It does not provide simple answers to questions on how, why or upon which sources biographies should be written or read. On the contrary, Understanding Biographies shows the numerous styles and wide-ranging conventions around the Western world in which biographies are accomplished.

Birgitte Possing interprets the biographical renaissance during the last thirty years as completely in keeping with the individualizing zeitgeist around the millennium shift. From a local to an international perspective, she identifies and reflects on the traditions in international writing and reading of biographies with examples from a wide range of Western and Nordic countries.

Birgitte Possing, dr.phil., professor at Rigsarkivet [Danish National Archives] in Copenhagen, Denmark. In 1992, her award-winning dissertation – a biography of Danish education pioneer Natalie Zahle – was the subject of much interest and discussion throughout the Nordic region for its fresh and humanising approach to history. The book has been translated into English (2001). Having worked as the director of several Danish cultural and research institutions, Possing then returned to her own research into the international history and methodology of the biographical genre. She has since published numerous articles on the subject, and a number of short biographical analyses of prominent figures in the fields of politics, the arts, scholarship and education.

ISBN: 978-87-7674-992-7

232 pages
Illustrated

Price: Approx. 32 euro.

Click here to read an excerpt.

Available at: Amazon | Amazon UK | Amazon DE | University Press of Southern Denmark

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3. CFP Photography and the Histories of Working Peoples and Laboring Lives 2/1/2017) Radical History Review

Photography and the Histories of Working Peoples and Laboring Lives

Issue number 132 (October 2018)
Abstract Deadline: February 1, 2017

Issue editors: Kevin Coleman, Jayeeta Sharma, and Daniel James
This issue explores the potential of photography as a medium that enables new and radical approaches to historicizing the study of labor, laboring lives, and working peoples, locally, transnationally, and globally. It seeks to showcase methodologically generative research that builds upon the recent boom in theoretical work in the fields of visual cultural studies and photography, and how insights from these fields can be harnessed to reinvigorate historical studies of working lives and ordinary people.

Even as photographs form part of a larger visual field that conditions what can be seen, said, and done in any given historical conjuncture, they create alternate possibilities for contestation or cultural assertion. Since its advent in the 1839, photography offered the possibility to simultaneously turn images of workers into objects of consumption even as it allowed their otherwise obscured histories to be recorded and disseminated. With the medium’s global circulation in the wake of capital and empire, working people worldwide were subjected to the disciplinary gaze of employers, overseers, and officials, and to touristic voyeurism. But increasingly, photography provided novel opportunities for ordinary people to represent themselves, and for others to join them in solidarity, as the technology morphed from inexpensive Kodak Brownie cameras and Polaroids to sophisticated camera-phones.

This issue asks:

  • What new insights for historians and the historical discipline do past and present photographs of working peoples and laboring lives enable?
  • How might photography act as an archive, a tool, and an interlocutor, whether by itself or through interactions with other forms of media?
  • What might such a visual archive offer for historicizing work and ordinary lives that text-based and other archival materials cannot?
  • How have workers historically negotiated the objectifying nature of photography and sought to redress power imbalances? How might this have differed for workers in different social positions, and over space and time?
  • What radical historical possibilities have emerged when working people, marginalized groups, and laboring movements pictured themselves? How have changing technologies and access to photography had an impact?
  • How have photographs, as material objects and conveyors of meaning, served to strengthen or weaken affective ties between workers, families, bosses, and the general public?
  • In what ways is photography itself a form of labor? What are the raced, classed, and gendered implications of this form of labor
  • How might the recent proliferation and dissemination of popularly produced images and self-authored images encourage the production of new radical and laboring histories?

The editors invite submissions from scholars working on any period and world region/s. We are especially interested in methodologically generative studies that draw upon photographic archives of working peoples and build upon the recent boom in theoretical work in visual culture studies and photography. Preliminary inquiries can be sent to the editors Kevin Coleman <Kevin.Coleman@utoronto.ca>, Jayeeta Sharma <js288uk@gmail.com>, and Daniel James.

Each issue of RHR publishes material in a variety of forms. Potential contributors are encouraged to look at recent issues for examples of both conventional and non-conventional forms of scholarship. We are especially interested in submissions that use images as well as texts and encourage materials with strong visual content. In addition to monographic articles based on archival research, we encourage non-traditional contributions such as photo essays, film and book review essays, interviews, brief interventions, “conversations” between scholars and/or activists, as well as teaching notes and annotated course syllabi for our various departments that include:

  • Historians at Work (reflective essays by practitioners in academic and non-academic settings that engage with questions of professional practice)
  • Teaching Radical History (syllabi and commentary on teaching)
  • Public History (essays on historical commemoration and the politics of the past)
  • Interviews (proposals for interviews with scholars, activists, and others)
  • (Re)Views (review essays on history in all media–print, film, and digital)

Procedures for submission of articles: At this time we are requesting abstracts that are no longer than 400 words; these are due by February 2017 and should be submitted electronically as an attachment to <contactrhr@gmail.com> with “Issue 132 submission” in the subject line. By March 2017, authors will be notified whether they should submit a full version to undergo the peer-review process. The due date for completed drafts is July 2017. An invitation to submit a full article or essay does not guarantee publication; publication depends on the peer-review process and the overall shape the journal issue will take.

Please send any images as low-resolution digital files embedded in a Word document along with the text. If chosen for publication, you will need to send high-resolution image files (jpg or tif files at a minimum of 300 dpi), and secure written permission to reprint all images. Authors must also secure permissions for sound clips that they may wish to include with their articles and essays in the online version of the journal. Articles selected for publication after the peer review process will be included in Issue 132 of Radical History Review, scheduled to appear in October 2018.

Abstract Deadline: February 1, 2017

Contact: contactrhr@gmail.com

Contact Info: contactrhr@gmail.com

Contact Email: contactrhr@gmail.com

URL: http://www.radicalhistoryreview.org/call-for-papers/

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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. (Re) Constructing Lives: Annual Conference of the SAES Workshop of the Biography Society (1/20/2017; 6/1-3/2017) France

(Re) Constructing Lives

Annual Conference of the SAES – Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne – 1-3 June 2017

Workshop of the Biography Society

Do biographies necessarily impose on lives an artificial pattern? Is not a life already a construction, quite apart from any attempt to write about it? If, on the one hand, biography may serve the ideological purpose of ceaselessly constructing and reconstructing idealized lives of iconic historical figures, on the other hand, it may just as well work the other way around. If biography can serve the purposes of myth-making, modern biography is more often than not an investigation, de-constructing the lives of historical personages to re-construct them on a more true-to-life basis. For instance, in a distant past, James Anthony Froude’s Life of Carlyle scandalized his contemporaries by knocking the great man off his pedestal, paving the way for Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, and much more recently the biographies of C. G. Jung by Richard Noll and Ronald Hayman, reconstructing the life of the Swiss psychologist in a very iconoclastic light, or again Pierre Péan’s François Mitterand, Un jeunesse française, unearthing once more the socialist leader’s commitment with the Vichy government.

This workshop will particularly welcome contributions looking at the positioning of biographies relatively to this ideological notion of “construction”. Other papers may concentrate rather on the biographers’ narrative discourse as a process of re-constructing those parts or sides of their subjects’ lives that have been erased out of historical document, whether intentionally or accidentally—a limit case in this respect is Ivan Jablonka’s Laetitia, and the use of ‘fictions de méthode’ to investigate the gaps. Another direction worth exploring would be the way in which, biographical information about an author/an artist may drastically inflect the reception of his/her work.

Submission: Please send a (provisional) title before 20 January 2017, and an abstract of no more that 200 words before 1st March to Joanny Moulin, joanny.moulin@univ-amu.fr.

Joanny Moulin – Professeur de littératures anglophones – Directeur du Département d’études sur le monde anglophone (DEMA)

Aix-Marseille Université – 29 avenue R. Schuman – 13628 Aix-en-Provence Tél: +33(0)4 13 55 36 46 – Mobile : +33(0)6 60 70 85 05

Email: joanny.moulin@univ-amu.fr


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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. European Journal of Life Writing Vol V 2016

Listed below please find the articles the European Journal of Life Writing has published for 2016. The full text of each article is available for free online in both HTML and PDF formats.

We are currently seeking donations to maintain the journal, and ensure that we can continue to collect and produce high-quality, academic articles on the subject of life writing, for academic consideration and interested members of the general public.

For more information, please contact the Journal Manager, Monica Soeting, at m.soeting@xs4all.nl

Articles

The Stranger in the Self. Hofmannsthal’s Relationship to Jewishness — David Österle; 1-12

A Demythologized Auto/Biography: Beginnings and Evolution of Metabiography in Feminine Postmodern Fiction — Souhir Zekri; 13-35

Beyond the Subject – towards the Object? Nancy K. Miller’s What They Saved: Pieces of a Jewish Past (2011) and the Materiality of Life Writing — Anne Rueggemeier; 36-54

“Proper” Profiles. On Facebook’s investment in the autobiographical genre. — Susanne Fuchs; 55-74

GENDER AND POLITICS IN AUTO/BIOGRAPHIES

Introduction: GENDER AND POLITICS IN AUTO/BIOGRAPHIES — Anneke Ribberink, Tiina Kinnunen, Kirsti Niskanen, Angelika Schaser; GP1-GP8

The Socialist New Woman Redux: Hella Wuolijoki’s Life Writing in the 1940s – Katarina Leppänen; GP9-GP23

Gender clashes and faux pas. the political diaries of Ulla Lindström, Swedish minister in 1954-66 — Gunnel Karlsson; GP24-GP44

Gender, Politics, and Participation: The Contests of Autobiographical Writings in Poland — Dietlind Huechtker; GP45-GP66

Creative Matters

Small Talk — Marjorie Kanter; C1-C35

Fourth IABA Europe Conference Papers

Introduction to the IABA Europe Madeira Conference Papers — EJLW Editors; MC1

Understanding Literary Diatexts: Approaching the Archive of Richmal Crompton, the Creator of ‘Just William’ Stories — Jane McVeigh; MC2-MC22

“The Literary Interview as Autobiography” — Jerome Boyd Maunsell; MC23-MC42

Grief Interrupted: Writing My Father’s Life — G. Thomas Couser; MC43-MC60

Framing an Accusation in Dialogue: Kafka’s Letter to His Father and Sarraute’s Childhood — Lorna Martens; MC61-MC76

Reviews and Reports

Fans of the Archive: Reading Fan Letters in Richmal Crompton’s Archive — Jane McVeigh; R1-R2

Extraordinary ordinary men Biographies of Dutch post-war premiers reviewed — Marieke Oprel; R3-R15

Is Relationality a Genre? — Julia Watson; R16-R25

Report on the Inaugural Asia-Pacific Chapter Conference — Jo Annette Parnell; R26-R33


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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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6. “Family Letters in Early America” (3/15/2017; 1/4-7/2018) MLA New York City

“Family Letters in Early America”
Proposals are sought for a special session roundtable for the 2018 MLA convention: “Family Letters in Early America”
Papers addressing letters/letter writing, actual or fictional, between parent(s)/guardian(s) and child(ren) in early America. Some thematic areas to consider include: sentiment; separation; advice; friendship; romance; letter as news, memorandum, dispatch, philosophical forum.

250-word abstract by 15 March 2017 to Mary Balkun (mary.balkun@shu.edu) and Susan Imbarrato (simbarra@mnstate.edu).


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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. The Stories We Tell: Forceful Discourses and The Veracity of Narrative(s) (2/17/2017) USA

An Interdisciplinary Conference

Fourth Annual Interdisciplinary Humanities Graduate Student Conference

University of California, Merced
Merced, California

April 22nd 2017

Keynote Speakers: Dr. Keisha-Khan Y. Perry, Associate Professor of Africana Studies, Brown University
&
Dr. Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley

As we enter the field of ideas, the presence of the narratives by which we ply our trade await us and steer our thoughts with the weight and gravity of their presence And so we must face the problem of precedent and the limits it places on what is available to be said and how and by whom it can be spoken or what can be allowed to speak, as well as forcing us to acknowledge the erasure or preclusion of certain Subjects and their Narratives. Therefore, this conference seeks to critically investigate our own narratives to consider those voices, human or otherwise, that have been silenced and forgotten. This conference takes seriously the entire enterprise of the humanities—and of human beings—invoking Raymond Williams’ directive when he writes that “we need different ideas because we need different relationships.”[1] Our disciplinary confines must be productively eroded and dissolved so that in the words of the late Benedict Anderson, we can embrace the useful feeling of becoming and being marginal and strange as we “begin to notice what is not there” and “become aware of what is unwritten as well as what is written.” Finally, we strive to become less comfortable and thus less complacent with the currents of our inquires and, like Julia Kristeva’s foreigner, feel “strengthened by the distance that detaches” us from others and renders ourselves “relative while others fall victim to the ruts of monovalency” that direct not just our scholastic moves and motives but also our thoughts and means of expression remains strategically necessary. [2] Joining these three concepts—the need to establish different relationships to the world, the recognition of the untold, and the renovation of the scholastic identity—this conference will ask how to approach our work from the outside, from the perspective of an intellectual foreigner rather than succumbing to the overwhelming draw of what has already been spoken and to those who speak it.

This conference seeks to expand our existing perspectives and practices, both disciplinary and interdisciplinary, to illuminate a wider view of what can be discussed with rigor beyond what we currently consider critical scholarship and who or what can participate in it. We question what counts as narrative, the devices and structures that legitimate it, and who decides what stories we are allowed to tell. How do we engage with the stories that are already told, and how might we mitigate lost narratives or narratives that have never been told? How do we speak from an Archive of erasure? What archival gaps remain to be populated with these abandoned voices? How do we challenge narratives that speak falsely? Considering the Anthropocene and the retroactive erasure it has wrought, can we find alternative post-human narratives to tell more truth than we ourselves may be comfortable facing or want to understand?

Possible presentation topics include but are by no means limited to the following, and we encourage topics that straddle the borderlines of conventional classification:

  • Post-humanism and the non-human
  • The intervention and impact of technology on narrative
  • Religion, philosophy, and theology
  • Disciplinary disruptions and their effect on storytelling
  • The problems imposed by disciplinary structures and intellectual precursors
  • Transcultural studies
  • Narratives of resistance, captivity, and those that are hidden, silenced, or hitherto untold
  • Autobiography
  • (Pre)historic memory and social imagination
  • Deployment of digital archives, and the ramifications of increasingly availability information
  • Translation and cross-cultural, cross-national, cross-species communication
  • Bare life and non-life

Please submit 300 word abstracts for: individual papers, presentation, poster, or panel proposals, along with a brief CV, or any questions to: IHGradConference@UCMerced.edu. For more information, please visit our website at: http://ihgradconference.ucmerced.edu.The deadline to submit a proposal is February 17th 2017. The conference will be held on April 22nd 2017 at the University of California, Merced.

[1] Williams, Raymond. “Ideas of Nature.” Culture and Materialism. New York: Verso, 1980: 85.

[2] Kristeva, Julia. Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Colombia University Press: 1991: 7.

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Last updated: 30 January 2017


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