Lives & Letters Mailing: Late September 2015

Lives & Letters Mailing: Late September 2015

 

Dear Colleagues,

Welcome to another Lives & Letters Mailing. This mailing contains information about:

1. Whites Writing Whiteness: Project news
Into Press! Archives book
Letterless in Cardiff
Faux Letters
Archives, Art & Activism

2. New Book: Beyond the Archive: Memory, Narrative, and the Autobiographical Process

3. New Book: Antjie Krog and the Post-Apartheid Public Sphere

4. British Library – National Life Stories Goodison Fellowships 2016

5. Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 38.2 (Spring 2015)

6. New Book: Life Writing and Politics of Memory in Eastern Europe

7. Creative Writing for women – Your story writes history
Organized by Dr Andrea Grieder, founder of transpoesis.

8. CFP: “The Critical ‘I’”, NEMLA Mar 17-20, 2016, Hartford. CT, Abstract deadline Sep 30, 2015

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1. Whites Writing Whiteness: Project news

Into Press! Archives book
The Archive Project: Archival Research in the Social Sciences
‘The Book’ has at last been sent off to its publisher, and for some details of content, please see http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/Archive-Project-Sendoff/ 

Letterless in Cardiff
On a recent trip to Cardiff for a retiral conference, Liz found herself without email, notebook, and mobile. This provided a small hint of how it may have felt, one or two centuries ago, to be without letters when the post was delayed for weeks or even months. To be bereft of relied-on forms of communication – to be letterless – was experienced as a kind of ontological damage by David Forbes in the later 1860s. This underscores interpersonal interconnectedness and how much we need to be in contact with loved others. The underlying purposes of letterness continues regardless of the present-day forms this takes. To read more about being letterless in Cardiff, please visit the blog: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/letterless-in-cardiff/

Faux Letters
Something that is ‘faux’ is, as they say, a genuine imitation. That is, it isn’t ‘false’ in the sense of intending dissimilitude, but ersatz and a substitute forming something of its own kind. What about ‘faux’ letters? These are the sorts of letters which are standardised to the greater degree and ‘signed’ by the ‘writer’. To read more about ‘faux’ letters, please visit the blog: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/faux-letters/

Archives, Art & Activism
Three key thoughts from The Archives, Art and Activism Conference. First, archives are indeed senergy by many colleagues as almost coterminous with life itself. Second, it seems few of us are interested in the rogues, villains, disreputable and frankly awful as also a part of humanity’s past, present, and doubtless its future too. Lastly, at the conference, A good chunk of the participants had been to South Africa, inevitably to Cape Town, and so many of us speaking and proclaiming about the country made me feel rather uncomfortable, us whities engaged – as we so often tend to – in an imperialist kind of project of knowing, naming and possessing. To read more thoughts and ideas from the Archives, Art and Activism Conference, please visit the blog: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/stop-press-archives-art-activism/

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2. New Book: Beyond the Archive: Memory, Narrative, and the Autobiographical Process

New Book by Jens Brockmeier
Beyond the Archive: Memory, Narrative, and the Autobiographical Process
Oxford University Press, September 2015 • 402 pp. • 9780199861569
Our longstanding view of memory and remembering is in the midst of a profound transformation. This transformation does not only affect our concept of memory or a particular idea of how we remember and forget; it is a wider cultural process. In order to understand it, one must step back and consider what is meant when we say memory. Brockmeier’s far-ranging studies offer such a perspective, synthesizing understandings of remembering from the neurosciences, humanities, social studies, and in key works of autobiographical literature and life-writing. His conclusions force us to radically rethink our very notion of memory as an archive of the past, one that suggests the natural existence of a distinctive human capacity (or a set of neuronal systems) enabling us to “encode,” “store,” and “recall” past experiences.

Now, propelled by new scientific insights and digital technologies, a new picture is emerging. It shows that there are many cultural forms of remembering and forgetting, embedded in a broad spectrum of human activities and artifacts. This picture is more complex than any notion of memory as storage of the past would allow. Indeed it comes with a number of alternatives to the archival memory, one of which Brockmeier describes as the narrative approach. The narrative approach not only permits us to explore the storied weave of our most personal form of remembering–that is, the autobiographical–it also sheds new light on the interrelations among memory, self, and culture.

More information about the book can be found at www.oup.com/us<https://global.oup.com/academic/product/beyond-the-archive-9780199861569?q=9780199861569&lang=en&cc=gb>>, Amazon.com<http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Archive-Autobiographical-Explorations-Psychology/dp/0199861560/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1440510609&sr=8-1&keywords=9780199861569>, and bn.com<http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/beyond-the-archive-jens-brockmeier/1121534359?ean=9780199861569>.

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3. New Book: Antjie Krog and the Post-Apartheid Public Sphere

UKZN Press is pleased to announce the forthcoming publication of
Antjie Krog and the Post-Apartheid Public Sphere
Speaking Poetry to Power
By Anthea Garman

ISBN: 978 1 86914 293 3
July 2015. 320pp.
Softcover. 230 x 150 mm.
Rights: World.
Interest: Literature, current affairs, politics, media studies

PRICE: R350.00

Antjie Krog has been known in Afrikaans literary circles and media for decades for her poetry and her strong political convictions. Often known simply as ‘Antjie’, she is also affectionately called ‘our beloved poet’ and our ‘Joan of Arc’ by Afrikaans commentators.

It was through her work on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as an SABC radio journalist and her subsequent book, Country of My Skull, that she then became known to English-speakers in South Africa and across the world. This work catapulted her particular brand of poetics and politics, honed over many years of her opposition to apartheid, into the South African public sphere at a time when the country was not only looking for a humane and just resolution after the apartheid era but was also establishing itself as a new democracy.

These were heady days as South Africa discovered an exciting place in the world, as it realised it had things to say and teach about race, conflict and justice.

It was also a time when the new government was seeking solutions and urging all those who could contribute positively to stand up and speak out. The language of ‘public intellectuals’ was in the air.

In this book, Anthea Garman considers how Krog, the prolific poet, journalist, non-fiction book author in English and now also academic and researcher, has made a significant contribution to the South African post-apartheid public sphere. Krog’s inimitable style, rooted in her sensibility as a poet, has allowed her to develop a particular persona and subjectivity as a writer of testimony and witness.

ANTHEA GARMAN is an associate professor in the School of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University where she teaches writing and editing and leads a research group investigating media and citizenship in South Africa. She was a journalist during the states of emergency in the 1980s and through the transition to democracy in the 1990s working for the Rand Daily Mail, Cape Times, Sunday Times and The Witness.


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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. British Library – National Life Stories Goodison Fellowships 2016

In 2016 two National Life Stories Goodison Fellowships will be awarded, generously sponsored by the Rootstein Hopkins Foundation, both focused particularly on Artists’ Lives recordings. Examples of recipients of the Fellowship might be a journalist, radio producer, writer, oral historian, an academic using oral history or a museum, library or archive professional. Possible outcomes might include a series of national newspaper or magazine articles, an in-depth radio programme or series, a book, journal article, exhibition, online or printed educational resource or a series of podcasts. The first 2016 Goodison Fellowship award of £5,000 is open to anyone resident in the United Kingdom who wishes to use NLS oral history collections, with a focus on Artists’ Lives, to research and produce work that will be published or broadcast in the public domain. An additional 2016 Goodison Fellowship award of £5,000 is open specifically to current and past staff and students of The Courtauld Institute of Art to support research with the same or similar outcomes; applicants for this award may also apply for the NLS Fellowship. See the Goodison Fellowships application information (PDF format) for further details. – See more at: http://www.bl.uk/projects/national-life-stories-artists-lives#sthash.Cvdt39FO.dpuf

Further details of the scheme are attached. The closing date for applications is Sunday 25 October 2015.

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5. Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 38.2 (Spring 2015)

Online Lives 2.0, edited by Laurie McNeill and John David Zuern

Laurie McNeill and John David Zuern “Online Lives 2.0: Introduction” v–xlvi

Looking back to Biography’s 2003 Online Lives, the coeditors reflect on continuities and analyze new developments in Internet-based auto/biographical production since the advent of Web 2.0. They outline recurring themes in the essays in Online Lives 2.0, which include the merging of public and private life, online self-curation, the socioeconomic dimensions of online self-presentation, and the filtering and falsification of lives in social media, and they explore the implications of these issues for auto/biography studies.

Julie Rak, “Life Writing Versus Automedia: The Sims 3 Game as a Life Lab” 155–80

Online environments are rapidly changing our understanding of what it means to construct a life story and what identity itself might come to mean in virtual worlds. This essay poses a direct challenge to the field of life writing by asking us to rethink “life” and “writing” as automedia.

Molly Pulda, “Victim/Victor: Stalking the Subject of Online Life Writing” 181–204

This essay notes an intersection between extreme acts of online stalking and everyday acts of online identity construction: both are marked by repetition. I propose an “ethics of interruption” to address the relational stakes of constructing and consuming online lives, broadening the scope of what counts as an act of life writing.

Kylie Cardell and Emma Maguire, “Hoax Politics: Blogging, Betrayal, and the Intimate Public of A Gay Girl in Damascus” 205–221

Blogs can connect disparate “others,” or focus attention on certain events, moments, or histories, but to what extent does the blog function within (or trouble) the paradigms of identity politics that also frame autobiographical narration in online contexts? This paper is a close analysis of A Gay Girl in Damascus, a fast moving case of online imposture that emerged in conjunction to the “Arab Spring” and catalyzed a host of issues connected to the representation, articulation, and circulation of marginal identity in online spaces.

Pamela Graham, “’An Encyclopedia, Not an Experiment in Democracy’: Wikipedia Biographies, Authorship, and the Wikipedia Subject” 222–44
Wikipedia biography is a culturally significant, yet overlooked form of digital life narrative. Through an examination of Wikipedia’s policies and discussion forums, and a number of its most popular and controversial biographies, this essay explores the politics of biographical practice and representation on the site.

Gillian Whitlock, “The Hospitality of Cyberspace: Mobilizing Asylum Seeker Testimony Online” 245–66

This article focuses on maritime voyages filmed and narrated by asylum seekers, where they become “produsers” of their own testimonial narratives that are then disseminated through both conventional and new media. Social media offers new venues and opportunities for the dissemination of testimony generated by the asylum seekers, from within the boats, trucks, and planes that transport them. Asylum seekers are not citizens seeking democracy in the public spaces of their own homelands; on the contrary, they are stigmatized as the barbarians at our gates, and as a threat to the security of the nation. In their hands, however, smartphones and social media enable new forms of testimonial narrative, from within spaces of detention. Can we speak of the hospitality of cyberspace on behalf of the dispossessed?

Updates from 2003 Online Lives

Madeleine Sorapure, “Autobiography Scholarship 2.0? Understanding New Forms of Online Life Writing” 267–72
Concepts of interface, interactivity, and organization are key to articulating autobiography theory that can account for popular new modes of online autobiographical writing taking place at social networking sites and in data-driven, visually-based infographic self-representations.

Andreas Kitzmann, “Re-Visiting the Web Cam and the Promises and Perils of the Fully Networked Age” 273–78

This essay reflects on my now ten year old investigation of the impact of web cams on the nature of life writing and the self. Despite the many changes that have occurred since that time, the trajectories of these older technologies and practices continue to have relevance today and provide us with a reasonable ground from which to continue our explorations into current and emerging technological practices.

John B. Killoran, “The Rhetorical Situations that Invite Us Online” 279–84

This article probes behind familiar self-presentational genres to inquire into how distinct rhetorical situations that converge on websites complicate how people present themselves on those sites. It reports on a sample of businesspeople who present aspects of their personal lives on their professional sites.

Elayne Zalis, “Designing a Theatre of Recollection for the Digital Age: Shifting Perspectives and the Autobiographical Eye” 285–89
Elayne Zalis discusses how “At Home in Cyberspace: Staging Autobiographical Scenes,” the essay that she published in the 2003 Online Lives issue of Biography, influenced a novel that she later wrote, Arella’s Repertoire, in which the narrator stages autobiographical scenes of her own in cyberspace. Like the websites that Zalis examined in her essay, Arella’s Repertoire explores new ways to share personal and cultural memories in the digital age.

Reflections from Practitioners

David Clark, “Pictures in the Stars: 88 Constellations for Wittgenstein and the Online ‘Biography'” 290–96
The author discusses his Internet artwork, which uses a non-linear, hyperlinking structure to create a kind of meta-biography anchored by Wittgenstein’s life and philosophy. Clark uses the constellations both as a navigation device as well as metaphor for how we make meaning (or pictures of meaning, as Wittgenstein would say), using the facts of Wittgenstein’s life to address the external relations of his life to the outside world, as digital media provides an opportunity to create a new kind of textuality that examines the relations of exteriority a life story has to our current situation.

Patricia G. Lange, “Vlogging Toward Digital Literacy” 297–302

The author traces her journey into the exotic, early world of video blogging, in which participants used video to share the self, develop empathy for others, and exchange knowledge. Moving from modest video blogs to an internationally-screened film demonstrated in a direct way that under the right circumstances participatory cultures work. Peer-to-peer mentorship and connected learning can open new forms of digital and participatory literacies in media cultures.

danah boyd, “Am I a Blogger?” 303–306

The author reflects on the evolution of her blogging practice. After becoming a blogger “kinda by accident,” increasing involvement in the blogging community led to a decision to live certain parts of her life in public, in a networked age where visibility can be both humanizing and de-humanizing. Studying teenagers and their relationship to social media  leads to questions about what it means to be a blogger today, as traditional aspects of power are now asserted through technologies that are deeply embedded in contexts of capitalism, traditional politics, and geoglobal power struggles.

Diane Josefowicz, “On (Not) Talking in the Dark: Why I Stopped Blogging” 307–311

This personal essay explores the author’s decision to stop blogging after a person close to the author revealed herself to be a hostile secret reader of the author’s blog. The author uses this experience to raise larger questions about online audiences and intersections between public writing and private life.

Paul Longley Arthur, “Coda: Data Generation” 312–20

It may be that the digital revolution has had a more profound effect on biography than any other branch of the arts. At the intersection of life writing and digital humanities, key questions can be posed: In what ways does the Web act to co-shape identities? How permanent are digital records of lives? Will we soon remember differently?

Contributors 321–23


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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. New Book: Life Writing and Politics of Memory in Eastern Europe

New Book: Life Writing and Politics of Memory in Eastern Europe
Edited by Simona Mitroiu

Palgrave Macmillan

http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/life-writing-and-politics-of-memory-in-eastern-europe-simona-mitroiu/?K=9781137485519

This volume addresses the issues of remembering and performing the past in Eastern European ex-communist states in the context of multiplication of the voices of the past. The book analyzes the various ways in which memory and remembrance operate; it does so by using different methods of recollecting the past, from oral history to cultural and historical institutions, and by drawing on various political and cultural theories and concepts. Through well-documented case studies the volume showcases the plurality of approaches available for analyzing the relationship between memory and narrative from an interdisciplinary and international perspective.

Contents

1. Introduction; Simona Mitroiu

PART I
2. Memories of Displacement and Unhomely Spaces: History, Trauma, and the Politics of Spatial Imagination in Ukraine and Poland; Irene Sywenky
3. Forgotten Memory? Vicissitudes of the Gulag Remembrance in Poland; Lidia Zessin-Jurek

4. When Memory Is Not Enough: Roaming and Writing the Spaces of the Other Europe; Katarzyna Kwapisz Williams

5. Re-Reading the Monuments of the Past; Andrea Průchová

PART II
6. Dignity and Defiance: The Resilience to Repair and Rebuild in Response to Despair; Hannah Kliger and Sheryl Perlmutter Bowen
7. Individual and Official Narratives of Conflict in Croatia: Schools as Sites of Memory Production; Borislava Manojlovic
8. Bordering on Tears and Laughter: Changes of Tonality in the Life Histories of Estonian Deportees; Aigi Rahi-Tamm
9. Memory of Lost Local Homelands. Social Transmission of Memory of the Former Polish Eastern Borderlands in Contemporary Poland; Małgorzata Głowacka-Grajper
PART III
10. Caught Between Historical Responsibility and the New Politics of History. On Patterns of Hungarian Holocaust Remembrance; Ferenc Laczó
11. From Skull Tower to Mall: Competing Victim Narratives and the Politics of Memory in the Former Yugoslavia; Michele Frucht Levy
12. Post-communist Romanians Facing the Mirror of Securitate Files; Raluca Ursachi
13. Divided memory in Hungary: the House of Terror and the lack of a left-wing narrative; Csilla Kiss


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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. Creative Writing for women – Your story writes history
Organized by Dr Andrea Grieder, founder of transpoesis

The capacity of writing is a talent to discover and explore. When you learn how to cultivate it, it can become your best company.
Goethe’s creative writing workshop gives you the opportunity to discover the power of words. Writing makes your memories alive. It brings meaning to your life and enables you to be aware of your inner strength.
What is your place in history? When individuals write history, it becomes a landscape with thousands of colors. Knowing your place in the past, makes you aware of the way you can contribute to the future.

From symbols to life stories to your place in history, you will learn to express and create yourself as unique and precious.
The workshop is held in English/Kinyarwanda.
Dr Andrea Grieder is a Social anthropologist who has founded transpoesis to foster poetic creativity (www.facebook.com/Transpoesis/timeline/ & www.transpoesis.ch<http://www.transpoesis.ch/>>).
She teaches Art and Anthropology. The workshop is held with Tete Divine Umulisa, artiste and writer.

Dates/Time:
Women’s workshop at Goethe-Institut on Saturdays: September 12, October 10 and October 24,
8:30 am to 1:30 pm.
Presentation at Public Library, Kacyiru, Kigali November 9th, 2015.
Contact: andrea@transpoesis.ch

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8. CFP: “The Critical ‘I’”
NEMLA Mar 17-20, 2016, Hartford. CT
Abstract deadline Sep 30, 2015

This roundtable examines the explored and unexplored possibilities (and challenges) of the autobiographical “I” in academic scholarship and literary criticism, both inside and outside the academy.

Scholars of life writing, such as Nancy K. Miller (Enough About Me, Bequest & Betrayal), have often included the personal in their scholarly projects. Yet, what might those traditionally marginalized by race, class, gender, sexuality, culture, and religion, add to various academic disciplines because of their personal experience. The social science forum Artic anthropology, addressing the combined disciplines of ethnography and biography, queried: “If, as [anthropologist] Michael Herzfeld has argued, the combination of these two genres as ‘ethnographic biography’ promises to overcome the vexing and ultimately specious divide between individual, socio-cultural and historical domains of experience, how might scholars across diverse fields take advantage of this potential?” Furthermore, creative scholars, such Wayne Koestenbaum (The Queen’s Throat) and, more recently, Louis Bury (Exercises in Criticism), have employed poetic, autobiographical aspects in their critical work, while encouraging scholars to look at the critical work done by autobiographical creative writers such as Geoff Dyer (Out of Sheer Rage).

Although it can be argued that much academic criticism has an autobiographical basis, in terms of what animates an author’s passion and interests, the inclusion of the self is often discouraged because of its perceived lack of objectivity and/or rigueur. Furthermore, effective use of autobiography in scholarly writing can be difficult to employ, as autobiographical and scholarly concerns should, ideally, complement each other, with the personal advancing the scholarly project; in some cases, its exclusion may hamper or falsify the critical work being done. This roundtable will provide creative scholars with an opportunity to discuss the challenges and potential of the critical “I.” Proposals representing a variety of disciplinary perspectives, historical eras, and methodological approaches are all welcome.

Submission Guidelines
This panel will be a part of the 47th Annual NeMLA Convention, March 17 to 20, 2016, in Hartford, CT.

Interested authors should submit abstracts of no more than 250 words through the CFP list on NeMLA’s website https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/15697. Submissions must also include the author’s full name, email address and institutional affiliation.

Submissions must be received by September 30, 2015.

Accepted panelists must be members of NeMLA by December 1, 2015, and register for the conference by the same date in order to present. Participants may only deliver one paper at the conference.

Inquiries (but not proposals) should be sent to David Bahr (dbahr@bmcc.cuny.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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Last updated: 26 September 2015


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