Lives & Letters Mailing: March 2016
Dear Colleagues,
Welcome to another Lives & Letters Mailing. This mailing contains information about:
1. Whites Writing Whiteness: Project News
New Schreiner Letters Found!
New Schreiner Letters Collection Now Available
New Trace: The ‘n word’: Le Sueur’s note, Sept 1901
Facts: sequence and series, v. biographical claims
Coming soon! Indiscriminate slaughter? 1851
2. Call for Papers (Grad): Special Issue, “What’s Next? The Futures of Auto/biography Studies” (4/10/16)
3. Call for Papers: Special Issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies on “Embodiment”
Guest Editor: Sarah Brophy, McMaster University
4. [Humanist] 29.708 Darwin Letters: new website
5. Call for Papers: TEXT Special Issue on the Essay
6. Documents in Women’s History (6/1/2016) Special issue of Women’s History Summer 2017
7. Call for Papers: Sixth international Finnish Oral History Network symposium
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1. Whites Writing Whiteness: Project News
There are five items of project news we would like to share this month:
New Schreiner Letters Found!
Liz Stanley is exceptionally pleased to announce that well over 200 previously unknown Olive Schreiner letters have just become available and will be published as part of the Olive Schreiner Letters Online. This is incredibly exciting news for all Schreiner scholars. Transcription will commence shortly, and bulletins about progress of publication and also the contents of the letters will be issued at intervals. For more, visit the blog: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/new-schreiner-letters-found/
And please also be sure to check out the OSLO website for more on the letters: https://www.oliveschreiner.org/
New Schreiner Letters Collection Now Available
We at Whites Writing Whiteness are very pleased to announce another new collection of Olive Schreiner letters is now available. This collection concerns correspondences between Schreiner and Winifred de Villiers, and is of great interest especially to those concerned with Women’s Enfranchisement. For more on this, please visit the blog: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/announcing-another-new-collection-of-schreiner-letters/
And also more information about this collection can be found on the OSLO website: https://www.oliveschreiner.org/
New Trace: The ‘n word’: Le Sueur’s note, Sept 1901
In discussion of a letter from JA Stevens and note from Gordon Le Sueur, both of whom were connected to Cecil Rhodes, unfolding connections between quests for status, race, and a nation in transition come to the fore. To read the trace and transcribed excerpts, please follow the link to the Trace: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/traces/thenword/
Coming soon! Indiscriminate slaughter? 1851
We are pleased to announce a forthcoming addition to, ‘Traces Remaining’ the highly popular area of the WWW Website. This new ‘Trace’ concerns claims about a wartime massacre that never took place but whether it would have done if not headed off, as well as raising the puzzle of why the women and children concerned were never specified in race or ethnic terms. Keep an eye on the Traces area of WWW for what promises to be an intriguing and insightful piece: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/traces/
Facts: sequence and series, v. biographical claims
It has been not unknown for claims to be made that letters are a flawed form of writing, because of their lack of referential characteristics and their multitude of representational ones. In short, they do not provide the facts, but mere partial representations. Discussion takes as a point of inquiry what Gordon Le Sueur claims about Olive Schreiner in his 1913 biography of Cecil Rhodes. For more on this, and also a short excerpt from Le Sueur’s book, please visit the blog: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/facts-sequence-and-series-v-biographical-claims/
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2. Call for Papers (Grad): Special Issue, “What’s Next? The Futures of Auto/biography Studies” (4/10/16)
Call-for-Papers: Special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies
“What’s Next? The Futures of Auto/Biography Studies”
The International Auto/Biography Association Student and New Scholar Network (IABA SNS) is excited to announce that we are collaborating with a/b: Auto/Biography Studies (www.tandfonline.com/raut) on a special issue of the journal, “What’s Next? The Futures of Auto/Biography Studies.”
a/b: Auto/Biography Studies was founded at the 1985 “International Symposium on Autobiography and Autobiography Studies” convened at Louisiana State University by James Olney. The work begun at this conference shaped, and continues to shape, the dynamics of scholarship on narrated lives. The thirtieth anniversary of a/b and the conference from which it emerged is an apropos time to reflect upon the possible futures of the field. This special issue, “What’s Next? The Futures of Auto/Biography Studies,” does this work by interweaving short essays from established researchers and emerging scholars who consider an array of possible futures of auto/biography studies, including: changing and globally expansive perspectives, the diversity of critical and generic inquiry, disciplinary intersections, multiple and collaborative methodologies.
The SNS Directive is guest editing contributions to this special issue from emerging scholars of life narrative who wish to add their voices to this conversation. We invite graduate students and new scholars to submit 350-word critical reflections that address new directions of life narrative theory and criticism. The reflections should be tightly focused on a particular idea, keyword, or theoretical concept of the author’s choosing and should explore possibilities, concerns, unexplored (or underexplored) terrain, or methodological and critical approaches in the field of auto/biography studies. We encourage contributors to consider the ways other disciplines overlap and intersect with Auto/Biography studies and welcome insight from a variety of academic fields, including the social and life sciences.
Topics of particular interest to the guest editors include, but are not limited to:
• political praxis;
• the lives of others, especially in consideration of relationality and how we construct and produce notions of the other in life narrative, (particularly in biographical forms);
• (dis)placement—notions of geographical space and place in contexts of settlement, land, sustainability;
• movement and temporalities—moving through time/ historical contexts;
• queer temporalities;
• interdisciplinarity and its relationship with notions of intersections and relationality;
• media and mediation;
• methodologies;
• the body;
• activism;
• power;
• images/ the visual/ graphic in life narrative; and
• representations of the self through art practice and performance.
The above list is by no means exhaustive. We welcome contributors’ interpretations the theme of “What’s Next? The Futures of Auto/Biography Studies” according to their own observations and inclinations, and as informed by their own research.
Submission Instructions
We encourage submissions that are clear, concise, and mindful of the limitations and possibilities of such a short piece of writing. We do not expect that these critical reflections will do the comprehensive work that longer scholarly essays do; rather, we seek responses that consider one point critically and reflectively. Although we are unable to accept thesis or dissertation abstracts, we are particularly interested in submissions emerging from the research of current graduate students.
In order to ensure a blind peer-review please include your name, address, email, the title of your essay, and your affiliation in a separate cover letter, removing any identifying information from the essay (including citations that refer to you as the author in the first person).
Complete submissions of 350-word essays (not including notes and bibliographies), your cover letter, and a short biographical note (no more than 100 words), should be sent as attachments to iabasnsnetwork@gmail.com by Sunday April 10, 2016.
Submissions should follow the format of the Modern Language Association Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (7th ed.). Please consult the a/b: Auto/Biography Studies website for additional style guidelines:
http://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?journalCode=raut20&page=instructions#.VoR4RJN95E4
The special issue will be 32.2 (2017).
About the Editors
Emma Maguire is a PhD Candidate in English Literature at Flinders University of South Australia where she is completing her doctoral thesis, titled Automedial Girlhoods: Reading Girls’ Autobiographical Practice in Digital Contexts. Her project investigates the autobiographical strategies employed by girls in online texts such as blogs, vlogs, and websites in order to examine how gender, youth, and mediation converge to produce girlhood subjectivities. She is also working on a research project about sex, sexualities, and life narrative. You can find out more about her work at emmamaguire.wordpress.com.
Maria R. Faini is a PhD candidate in Ethnic Studies and Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is completing her dissertation titled The Art of Occupation: Moral Injury, Artisanal Destruction, and a Politics of Non-Arrival. Publications include essays in Locating Life Stories: Beyond East-West Binaries in (Auto)Biographical Studies and Ada: A Journal of Gender, Technology, and New Media. She has also written for Nation of Change and The Feminist Wire, and is co-executive editor of nineteen sixty nine: an ethnic studies journal.
Orly Lael Netzer is a PhD student at the University of Alberta’s Department of English and Film Studies, where she focuses on exploring formations of cross-cultural relationships in Canadian literatures at the turn of the 21st century. She is a research affiliate at the Canadian Literature Centre: www.abclc.ca, and co-edited “Auto/Biography in Transit,” a special issue of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly (38:1,Winter 2015).
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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. Call for Papers: Special Issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies on “Embodiment”
Guest Editor: Sarah Brophy, McMaster University
a/b: Auto/Biography Studies seeks original articles for a special issue on “Embodiment” to be published as volume 33.2. Embodied lives, in all their corporeal, social, sensory, affective, political, economic, and technological dimensions, are the primary grounds for auto/biographical production. Building on the groundbreaking feminist work of the 1980s and 90s that brought embodied subjectivity to the fore, research in the field of life writing continues to generate powerful insights into the constitution, inscription, chronicling, narrativization, and performance of multiple embodiments, including an expansive and nuanced engagement with illness, disability, gender, grief, and trauma. Open to a wide variety of critical work on embodiment and auto/biography from a range of humanities and social science inter/disciplines, this special issue highlights two emergent areas demanding attention: 1) the biopolitics and necropolitics of race and disability, considered dialectically together with resistant acts, practices, and movements; and 2) the intensified, shifting relationships among auto/biography, embodiment, and mediation in the era of digital communication. Accordingly, essays could consider:
• Why and how have certain auto/biographical modes that pertain to or index embodiment emerged as especially pervasive and popular at the beginning of the twenty-first century? What are the genealogies of these evolving forms, and what are their innovations, affordances, and dilemmas? Examples might include: medical micronarratives; photojournalism; profiles; ecological memoirs; graphic non-fiction; wearable technology; data tracking and the “quantified self”; social media; selfies and self-portraiture; collective biography; performance and/or installation art; digital design and play.
• How does auto/biographical cultural production critique the ways that bodies are inscribed, produced, circulated, de/valued, targeted, exploited, and/or exalted under capitalist and settler-colonialist structures? Under what conditions do bodies come to testify or to stand in opposition to occupation, war, displacement, austerity, eugenics, hunger, thirst, pain, incarceration, and/or surveillance? What are the material, infrastructural, generic, and discursive conditions of, and obstacles to, such testimony? In what ways might auto/biography challenge presumptions of limitation or damage regarding particular subjects and/or communities?
• How and why are auto/biographical modes deployed to think through “transmission” and “intercorporeality,” including, for instance, relations of toxicity, injury, contagion, communicability, inheritance, and/or futurity?
• What kinds of embodied relationalities, or kinships, are being imagined and mobilized in auto/biographical projects, and according to what impetuses?
• What is the role of the “lived” everyday—the mundane, the chronic, the atmospheric, the textured, the interior, and/or the surface—in life narratives, images, practices, and/or archives of embodiment?
• Why and how might auto/biography scholarship engage, recontextualize, and/or revise influential theoretical concepts of “the body,” i.e. from phenomenology, assemblage theory, feminist intersectionality, new materialism, affect studies, visual culture studies, digital studies, post-structuralism, posthumanism, biopolitics, and/or trauma theory?
• What critical framings, methods, and pedagogies are necessitated by bodies on the move, by bodies in conflict zones and under occupation, by bodies crossing or inhabiting borders, or by bodies in revolt or refusal?
• What is the salience of theorizing embodied narratives and self-inscriptions in terms of im/material labour or precarious labour?
• If embodiment is constituted (perhaps now more than ever) through mediation and remediation, then what critical methods and questions do repeated, iconic embodied images, tropes, and narratives require?
• What is the relationship between narratives, images, practices, and/or archives of embodiment, on the one hand, and acts of citizenship on the other? How and when might embodied auto/biography mobilize (new) repertoires, ensembles, or collectivities?
This special issue is imagined as an opportunity to bring auto/biography studies into generative dialogue with critical interdisciplinary fields that are asking urgent methodological, historical, material, and philosophical questions about embodied lives, including but not necessarily limited to: migration, citizenship, social justice, Black studies, Indigenous studies, Asian and Asian diaspora studies, mixed race studies, disability studies, crip/queer studies, mad studies, trans studies, women’s and gender studies, fat studies, sexuality studies, child and youth studies, aging, ecocriticism, animal studies, and narrative medicine.
Send original articles of 6,000-8,000 words (including works cited and notes) to Sarah Brophy (brophys@mcmaster.ca) on or before December 15, 2016. Inquiries also welcome.
Biographical Note: Sarah Brophy is Professor in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. She is the author of Witnessing AIDS: Writing, Testimony, and the Work of Mourning (University of Toronto Press, 2004) and coeditor with Janice Hladki of Embodied Politics in Visual Autobiography (University of Toronto Press, 2014).
All essays must follow the format of the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (7th ed.) and the a/b Style Sheet, which can be found here.
Essays submitted for the special issue, but not selected, may be considered general submissions and may be selected for publication. Authors are also requested to include a fifty-word abstract and two to four keywords with their submissions. In order to ensure a confidential peer review, remove any identifying information, including citations that refer to you as the author in the first person. Cite previous publications, etc. with your last name to preserve your anonymity in the reading process. Include your name, address, email, the title of your essay, and your affiliation in a cover letter or cover sheet for your essay. It is the author’s responsibility to secure any necessary copyright permissions and essays may not progress into the publication stage without written proof of right to reprint. Images with captions must be submitted in a separate file as 300 dpi (or higher) tiff files.
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Ricia Anne Chansky, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez
Editor, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies
www.tandfonline.com/raut
https://www.amazon.com/author/riciachansky
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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. [Humanist] 29.708 Darwin Letters: new website
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 29, No. 708.
Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London
www.digitalhumanities.org/humanist
Submit to: humanist@lists.digitalhumanities.org
Date: Fri, 12 Feb 2016 13:51:23 +0000
From: fjn26 <fjn26@CAM.AC.UK>
Subject: New Darwin Letters Website
Today would have been Charles Darwin’s 207th birthday, and to mark the
occasion the Darwin Correspondence Project has launched a new website
(www.darwinproject.ac.uk). The letters to and from Darwin for the year
1871 are online for the first time. There is a brand new search engine,
a lot of new content on correspondents and themes, and new resources for
primary schools.
Please have look, and pass this on to other interested parties. Comments
are welcome.
Very good wishes,
Francis.
—
Dr Francis Neary
Editor, Darwin Correspondence Project
University Library, West Road
Cambridge, CB3 9DR, UK
Email: fjn26@cam.ac.uk
Website: www.darwinproject.ac.uk
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5. Call for Papers: TEXT Special Issue on the Essay
Edited by Rachel Robertson, Curtin University and Kylie Cardell, Flinders University
But, what is an essay? In his introduction to the 2014 volume of The Best Australian Essays, Robert Manne tackles the question of definition (intriguingly in itself, one nearly every editor in the series has also foregrounded) and hopes, given this is his ‘second innings’, that it is an issue he now has a clearer view of: ‘I had thought of an essay as any brief piece of non-fiction prose. I no longer do […] For me at least, an essay is a reasonably short piece of prose in which we hear a distinctive voice attempting to recollect or illuminate or explain one or another aspect of the world. It follows from this that no essay could be jointly authored. It also follows, that, with an essay, we trust that the distinctive voice we hear is truthful or authentic, even when perhaps it is not’ (ix). That Manne drops ‘non-fiction’ from his definition seems significant. As does his emphasis on a distinctive voice, authentic and truthful, even when perhaps it is not.
This issue of TEXT is an invitation for writers, scholars, and creative practitioners to think through the implications of the essay as an evolving contemporary genre in Australasia. While we presume a focus on contemporary literature and national context, given the recent popularity of the essay here, we also welcome contributions that gauge and reflect on the genre as it has developed historically, or that trace its inflections in international contexts of relevance to Australasian stories and voices. The essay is a diverse and fluid genre and attentiveness to issues of definition seem important. The essay is a pedagogical mode, one that often seems far removed from its more literary relatives, and we welcome interventions in thinking through the essay as it is used in tertiary contexts as a creative practice. What is an essay? Who writes essays, and how? What does the essay do in the Australian publishing context and why should we pay attention to this? What is problematic about the essay, and why? We welcome abstracts on these and other themes:
• The essay in Australia and New Zealand
• Defining the essay
• Subgenres and styles
• New media and the essay
• The essay as poetry or performance
• The essay as journalism
• The publishing industry and the essay
• Indigenous voices
• Questions of gender
• The essay as polemic
• Social justice and the essay
• The essay in South-East Asia
Submissions may be scholarly articles of 4,000-6,000 words or creative works of up to 4,000 words. Creative works must be accompanied by a Research Statement outlining the work’s background, contribution and significance. Selected book reviews will also be included. Examples of the kind of work TEXT publishes can be found on the website: http://www.textjournal.com.au
Please send your abstract of 350-400 words with a 50 word bio statement as a word document attachment to Rachel Robertson at R.Robertson@curtin.edu.au by 25 March 2016. The editors will choose abstracts for development (based on their strength and how they fit into the issue as a whole) and respond to you by 22 April 2016. Papers provisionally accepted by the editors will be due by 12 August 2016 and then sent for peer review. Please send any queries to Rachel on R.Robertson@curtin.edu.au.
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6. Documents in Women’s History (6/1/2016) Special issue of Women’s History Summer 2017
“Documents in Women’s History”, Women’s History, special issue (summer 2017).
Edited by Marie Ruiz (Université Paris Diderot, LARCA) and Mélanie Grué (Université Paris-Est Créteil Val de Marne, IMAGER)
Historians face a difficult task when dealing with historical documents, testimonials revealing or concealing “truth.” As objects of enquiry, documents, sometimes limited in what they can disclose, have very often resisted historians’ intentions to show “reality.” This is even more vivid in the context of women’s history, a subjected topic that has undergone invisibility through male domination. In “Policing Truth” (1994), Leigh Gilmore argues that the notion of truth is intertwined with the notion of gender: man is a judge who has historically defined the rules and standards of truth in order to perpetuate patriarchal authority and male privilege.
Barbara Kanner’s work of bibliomethodology, Women in English Social History, 1800-1914: A Guide to Research (1988), has been a major contribution to unveiling the existence of documents informing the participation of women in all fields of British history. This special issue of Women’s History intends to address the subjectivity of historical documents, and the place left to women in the course of history. It gives a special place to historical evidence and iconic documents revealing women’s resistance to patriarchal rule, whether in history, photography, film, or artistic representations. This volume focuses on the nature of historical documentation and its gender bias. It intends to address the question of subjectivity in women’s history.
The articles that will constitute this special issue shall focus on what documents have shown about women. The role of historians, witnesses, artists and writers shall also be included, as well as questions related to reality and objectivity in women’s history. Contributions dealing with women as producers of documents are welcome. As an oppressed group, women have indeed seized the opportunity to write their personal and collective history on their own terms, to document their lives and claim their worth against the patriarchal rule. They have produced a wide array of documents, from text to image and film, revealing the reality of female experience.
The question of perception and reception is also of interest as it determines what documents tell us about women’s ability to find a place in history through their disruption of dominant cultures.
Proposals dealing with what documents can reveal about women’s personal and collective history are welcome. They may include the following themes, though not exclusively:
• absence in historical records/scarcity of references
• art as historical document
• bibliomethodology
• difference in documents’ treatment
• documentary and oral record
• document and memory
• documentary evidence
• documents’ archiving and classification
• documents’ mislabelling
• historical representations of women in the arts
• women’s historic artistic productions as sites of identity claims
• iconic documents
• immediate archive
• journalism/mass information
• manipulation/selection
• objectivity/subjectivity
• official records
• production and intention
• subaltern documents
• visibility/invisibility
• women in aesthetic movements
• women’s speeches and speeches about women
• documenting the past, documenting the present
• the reception and interpretation of documents
• relationship between producer/writer and spectator/reader
5000-word articles, along with short academic biographies, should be submitted to both editors: mariejruiz@yahoo.fr and melanie.grue@hotmail.com.
The deadline for submission of articles is June 1, 2016.
Marie Ruiz and Mélanie Grué
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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: Sixth international Finnish Oral History Network symposium
Fragile Memories: Doing Oral History with Vulnerable Narrators
24–25 November 2016
Helsinki, Finland
Papers are invited for contributions to the sixth international symposium of the Finnish Oral History Network Fragile Memories: Doing Oral History with Vulnerable Narrators hosted by the Finnish Literature Society in collaboration with the Academy of Finland. The symposium aims to bring together scholars of oral history and life writing to discuss vulnerability. Invited speakers include Sean Field (University of Cape Town), Malin Thor Tureby (University of Linköping), Anna-Kaisa Kuusisto-Arponen (University of Tampere) and Ulla Savolainen (University of Helsinki).
The symposium addresses vulnerability from several perspectives. It may refer to individuals or groups coping with or recovering from the consequences of natural disasters or man-made crises, poverty, war or other experiences of violence. Vulnerability is also about lack of power and its impact: seclusion, insecurity and helplessness. Additionally, researchers and persons working with oral history often define individuals -or groups under scrutiny- as vulnerable. This may have a negative impact on individuals and communities and also the oral historian and interviewee relationship.
We encourage papers which explore how people cope with strain; socially, culturally and materially in practice, in narratives and/or in images, but also examine theoretical, methodological and fragile ethical issues related in doing oral history with vulnerable narrators. The symposium invites scholars to investigate power-relations between oral historians and interviewees related to vulnerability.
The language of the conference is English. Proposals may be submitted as individual papers or workshop sessions. The proposed papers should focus on individual remembering and methodological aspects related to the topic. All proposals should include a title and an abstract maximum of 250 words (per paper). Proposals for whole sessions should include all abstracts of the suggested papers. Please include in the proposal the following information: your name (with your surname in CAPITAL letters), affiliation, postal and e-mail addresses and telephone.
Proposals will be evaluated according to their focus on the topic. Please e-mail your proposal as an e-mail attachment by 16 May 2016 to fohn@finlit.fi. Notifications of acceptance will be communicated in mid-June 2016.
Admission to the symposium is 50€ (standard)/ 35€ (Concession: students/postgraduates/unwaged). Registration by 16 September 2016.
Enquiries: fohn@finlit.fi
Anne Heimo Kristiina Takkinen
Chair, FOHN Course Secretary,
FOHN
UNIVERSITY OF TURKU UNIVERSITY OF HELSINKI
Further information: http://www.finlit.fi/fi/fohn-en
Facebook: Finnish Oral History Network / Twitter: FOHN Finland
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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: 11 March 2016
