Lives & Letters Mailing: May 2016
Dear Colleagues,
Welcome to another Lives & Letters Mailing. This month’s mailing contains information about:
1. Whites Writing Whiteness: Project News
• Latest ‘How-To’ Instalments
• New! Thinking with Elias
• New Trace: Whiteness, now you see it, now…
• From the Weekly Blog: On Scribbling: Letters to self?
• From the Weekly Blog: Notes, scribbles, lists and not/letterness
2. The Individual in African History: The Importance of Biography in African Historical Studies (6/3/2016) Edited Collection and Workshop, the Netherlands
3. LIFE WRITING VOLUME 13 ISSUE 2, JUNE 2016, is now available on Taylor & Francis Online
4. CFP The Literature of Remembering: tracing the limits of memoir (7/30/2016)
5. [MASSOBS] NOTABLE WOMEN EVENT AT CHARLESTON FESTIVAL
6. Upcoming events at the Biography Society 5/27/2016 and 6/2-4/2016 and 8/22-26/2016 (France and Ireland)
7. Publication of Special Issue on 19th-Century Collaborative Life Writing
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1. Whites Writing Whiteness: Project News
There are 5 new items of project news we would like to share this month:
Latest ‘How-To’ Instalments
In our last Lives & Letters mailing, we announced the creation of a new area of the website which gives detailed advice about undertaking archival research from a ‘how-to’ perspective. Since then, four new posts have been added, and these detail the processes of reviewing, interpreting documents, and finishing an archival project. To browse the new posts, please visit the How-To part of the website: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/how-to/
New! Thinking with Elias
An occasional series of short think-pieces will begin appearing on the WWW website, discussing the whys and wherefores of operationalising ideas drawn from the work of Norbert Elias as its conceptual and analytical framework. These will be in the spirit of ‘thinking with Norbert Elias’, rather than ‘applying’ his ideas. To read the first instalments, please visit the website: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/thinking-with-elias/
New Trace: Whiteness, now you see it, now…
This trace analyses two photographs; the first is of the Zulu King Dinizulu and liberal campaigner Harriet Colenso (1908), and the second is of the seated Grand Templar Anna Tempo daughter of freed slaves, and an unnamed woman (circa late 1890s’ – early-1900s). Contextual knowledge is important here, for the images do not speak for themselves, with the understandings and knowledge of the present standing between us and our attempts to unpack their meaning. To read the trace and view the photographs concerned, please visit the Trace webpage: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/traces/whiteness-now-you-see-it-now/
From the Weekly Blog: On Scribbling: Letters to self?
Scribbles, the kind of notes that people write as aide memoirs to themselves when carrying out a piece of research might possibly come under the heading of ‘letters to oneself’. This is because they contain some signs of epistolarity, in involving a ‘voice’ writing to another ‘voice’ as though separated in time and space from its other. The particular example discussed also provides information, makes a comment, asks questions, and suggestions are made about ‘shared’ activities. To read more about this, please visit the blog: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/scribbling-a-letter-to-oneself/
From the Blog: Notes, scribbles, lists and not/letterness
This blog continues the occasional conversation on WWW blog-pages about the permeable borders of letter-writing and the complex relationships that exist between epistolarity and parallel more transitory forms which are not letter-writing but nonetheless have some of the characteristics associated with it. Concerning the letterness of a particular ?list, ?note, ?scribble, made in the course of a shopping mission, what it is and what it is not are considered. To read more, please visit the blog: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/notes-scribbles-lists-inventories/
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2. The Individual in African History: The Importance of Biography in African Historical Studies (6/3/2016) Edited Collection and Workshop, the Netherlands
Call for Papers African Dynamics
The Individual in African History: The Importance of Biography in African Historical Studies
The biographical method promises to offer unique and unexpected insights in the study of African history. Ideally it should tell us something about the wider historical context, how individuals or groups of individuals have influenced the flow of historical events, but also how these people, their ideas and understanding of the world in which they lived, have been shaped by this historical context. Historically contextualised biography can offer us unique insight into the complexity of the individual, and provide us with valuable opportunities to give analytical nuances to our understanding of history.
However, without an analytically reasoned narrative as instrument, our understanding of historical actors is undermined. This draws our attention to the perennial question of the historiography of Africa and its sources. African state archives’ relevance for the historiography of the post-colonial era is diminishing (often due to their deteriorating quality, deliberate destruction or politics of silencing). Moreover, colonial archives categorise and classify historical data in ways that perpetuate the blinkered perspective that was ingrained in colonial rule and tied to the purpose of administration and control. People could therefore easily vanish from the archived view. A focus on the individuality of the person or groups of persons would place the individual(s) at the centre stage of research and could help overcome fundamental strictures that are imposed on the historian by the specific nature of the archives concerned. This means that biographical research that does justice to the complexity of the individual and historical context should be based on other source material as well, for example ego-documents, as well as oral histories and personal reminiscences collected in the field.
Such biographical research, which is firmly contextualised, can give us important insights about the wider historical context and the times in which the person under study lived, but also demonstrate the influence that the historical context exercised on the individual. Biographical research offers a unique opportunity to acquire an understanding of how ontologies have emerged in Africa as a product of the historical interaction between context and individuals. Such a focus enables us to obtain an insight in the process of meaning-giving to domains such as the political, the religious or the social in different African historical contexts and contemporary realities.
Taken together, this approach enables us to reconsider what makes people significant or remarkable in African history: people are not only remarkable for what they have achieved, for how they have influenced and defined history (traditional biography), they may also be remarkable and significant for how their being, their views and acts have been shaped by the interface between structure and agency, between ontologies and interpretation. Such biographical stories allow an analytical focus on the interface between the individual and the time in which they lived; they shed light onto how the historical context made people to what they were, a product of their time and place.
For the 2018 volume of the ASCL/Brill African Dynamics series, we invite proposals for papers that explore the interface between the individual (or groups of people/individuals) in their historical context in Africa. The papers should employ the biographical method and tie together a diversity of source material so that they yield insights that would otherwise remain hidden from the historical view. As such, the papers will reflect on what new insights in the history of Africa can be produced through a biographical perspective.
Two consecutive workshops with the authors of selected papers will be held at the African Studies Centre Leiden on 30 September – 1 October 2016 and May 2017.
Please send your proposal for an 8.000 – 10.000 word paper to j.b.gewald@ascleiden.nl, walraven@ascleiden.nl and m.j.de.goede@hum.leidenuniv.nl on or before 03 June 2016. The proposal should contain the title of the paper, an abstract of the proposed paper (300 words), the source material used, as well your institutional affiliation and contact details.
Please bear in mind that the ASC will not be able to fund travel costs.
The editors, Jan-Bart Gewald (gewald@ascleiden.nl), Klaas van Walraven (walraven@ascleiden.nl) and Meike de Goede (m.j.de.goede@hum.leidenuniv.nl)
Contact Info:
CRG Adrican History
African Studies Centre
P.O.Box 9555
2300 RB Leiden
The Netherlands
Contact Email: walraven@ascleiden.nl
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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. LIFE WRITING VOLUME 13 ISSUE 2, JUNE 2016, is now available on Taylor & Francis Online
Special issue: Life Writing After Empire
Guest editor: Astrid Rasch, University of Copenhagen
This new issue contains the following articles:
Dedication to the late Professor Bart Moore-Gilbert, 1952-2015.
EDITORIAL: Life Writing After Empire
Astrid Rasch
pages 163-167.
ARTICLES:
Collusions and Imbrications: Life Writing and Colonial Spaces
Professor Charles Lock, University of Copenhagen
pages 171-189
Tears and Garlands: Lim Chin Siong, Coldstore, and the End(s) of Narrative
Professor Philip Holden, National University of Singapore
pages 191-205
‘National Awakening’, Autobiography and the Invention of Manning Clark
Professor Mark McKenna, The University of Sydney
pages 207-220
The Relational Imaginary of M. G. Vassanji’s A Place Within
Dr Vera Alexander, University of Groningen
pages 221-236
‘A nation on the move’: The Indian Constitution, Life-Writing and Cosmopolitanism
Professor Javed Majeed, King’s College London
pages 237-253
‘This Union-Jacked Time’: Memories of Education as Post-Imperial Positioning
Astrid Rasch, University of Copenhagen
pages 255-270
REFLECTION:
Gibraltarian Oral Histories: Walking the Line Between Critical Distance and Subjectivity
Dr Jennifer Ballantine Perera, Garrison Library and Professor Andrew Canessa, University of Essex
pages 273-283
BOOK REVIEW:
How Empire Shaped Us, eds. Antoinette Burton and Dane Kennedy
reviewed by Stephen Howe, University of Bristol
pages 287-293
Afterword: The Ends of Empire
Professor Gillian Whitlock, University of Queensland
pages 295-303
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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. CFP The Literature of Remembering: tracing the limits of memoir (7/30/2016)
Call for Papers
The Literature of Remembering: tracing the limits of memoir
The genre of memoir is read so widely that it now ‘rivals fiction in popularity and critical esteem and exceeds it in cultural currency’ (Couser 2012, p.3). This call for papers urges scholars from around the globe to find and describe the practice of writing and reading memoir within their own borders as a cultural phenomenon. How does it differ from country to country? How has it evolved? What are the ethical constraints of different countries? Who are each nation’s unique memoirists?
We aim to compile a comprehensive and academically entertaining snapshot of the genre. There is a long and deep history of memoir, most agree, that begins with Saint Augustine’s Confessions. Scholars concur that the contemporary surge in memoir as a favoured genre began in the mid-1990s, with Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, and it has kept building in momentum. Not only are well-known authors rendering their memoirs to acclaim, but seemingly ordinary people finding themselves in extraordinary circumstances, are finding an audience. Sportspeople, politicians, sex workers, trauma victim/survivors, are telling and sharing their stories as a mode of knowing the self.
Sue Joseph, Bunty Avieson and Fiona Giles, the editors, are seeking scholarly essays for this book (of up to 300 pages) to be published in 2017. We are hoping to work with a major international publisher towards this end. While we welcome papers from all countries, submissions must be in English.
Section One: The Memoir in History: life-writing throughout the ages
Chapters here could focus on:
• Saint Augustine
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• Mary MacLane and the sex memoir
• Holocaust memoir
• War memoir
Section Two: The ethical/theoretical dimensions of memoir: political, fabricated, Celebrity
Chapters here might look at:
• The PR of celebrity memoir
• Consent: whose story is it?
• Memoir writing about the dead
• Competing memoir
• Is memoir literary journalism?
• Fake memoir
Section Three: The practice of memoir writing
Chapters here might examine:
• Parental: patriography; matriography
• Pathography: narratives of illness and death
• Mis-mem
• Sports memoir
• Personal trauma narrative
• Political memoir
• Ghosting the memoir
• Erotica: kiss and tell memoir
• Travel memoir
• Memoir and comedy
• Nobody memoirs
These subjects are neither prescriptive nor exhaustive. They merely indicate a possible range of topics that might create new ways of understanding the genre. There are clearly many other equally important routes to explore.
Please send 200-word chapter abstracts to Sue Joseph at sue.joseph@uts.edu.au by July 30, 2016. Selected contributions (5-6,000 words) will be confirmed by September 30, 2016. First copy will be due by February 30, 2017. The editors will send out for peer review, then return the copy with any suggested changes by April 30, 2017, with the final copy deadline of May 30, 2017.
Bunty Avieson is a lecturer in the Department of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney, where she teaches news writing. A former journalist she has also published three novels, a novella and two memoirs. The most recent, The Dragon’s Voice: How modern media found Bhutan, was about the year she spent in Bhutan as a media consultant funded by the UN.
Fiona Giles is a senior lecturer in the Department of Media and Communications at the
University of Sydney, where she teaches graduate courses in creative nonfiction and feature writing. Her most recent publications have been on profile writing, and Gonzo journalism in Australia, and she is currently researching Australian memoir since the 1960s.
Sue Joseph has worked as an academic, teaching print journalism at the University of Technology, Sydney since 1997. She now teaches journalism and creative writing, particularly creative long form non-fiction writing, in both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. She has written three books and is currently writing a fourth on Australian creative non-fiction writers. Her research interests are around sexuality, secrets and confession, framed by the media; ethics, trauma; reflective professional practice; and Australian creative non-fiction.
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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. [MASSOBS] NOTABLE WOMEN EVENT AT CHARLESTON FESTIVAL
Dear all,
Please find below details of an upcoming event at Charleston Festival. Simon Garfield is the editor of A Notable Woman: The Romantic Diaries of Jean Lucey Pratt. Jean kept an diary for Mass Observation during the Second World War.
May 22 2016
NOTABLE WOMEN
Simon Garfield and Helen Simonson with Nicolette Jones
7:30pm Tickets £14
A Notable Woman, The Romantic Journals of Jean Lucey Pratt, edited by Simon Garfield, and The Summer Before the War, by Helen Simonson, chart shifting landscapes for women in society. Pratt’s diaries, 1925-1986, have become a word-of-mouth sensation. “Timeless, funny and utterly absorbing” (Hilary Mantel). Helen Simonson’s The Summer Before the War is set in East Sussex in 1914: the arrival of a free thinking woman and the coming of WW1 test old ways. Helen Simonson’s previous novel was Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand. Simon Garfield’s non-fiction books include Just my Type, On the Map, To the Letter and My Dear Bessie. With Nicolette Jones, critic and journalist.
Supported by Mayer Brown
Tickets: http://www.charleston.org.uk/events/notable-women/
Jessica Scantlebury
The Mass Observation Archive
The Keep
Woollards Way
Brighton
BN1 9BP
j.c.scantlebury@sussex.ac.uk
+441273 337515
www.massobs.org.uk
www.thekeep.info
twitter.com/MassObsArchive
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6. Upcoming events at the Biography Society 5/27/2016 and 6/2-4/2016 and 8/22-26/2016 (France and Ireland)
MAY 2016
JOURNÉE D’ÉTUDES : “ECRITURES BIOGRAPHIQUES” 27 MAI 2016
Study day: “Biographical writings” – 27 May 2016
Aix-Marseille Université
Maison de la recherche, AMU-ALLSH
29 av. Robert Schuman 13621 Aix-en-Provence
(English below)
Présentation
Cette journée d’études se donne pour objectif principal de réunir des enseignants-chercheurs, chercheurs et doctorants dont les travaux portent sur les écritures biographiques au sens large. Le périmètre concerné se situe à l’intérieur de la Fédération CRISIS, avec des ouvertures sur la Faculté ALLSH et des invités français et étrangers. Il s’agit essentiellement de comparer et de faire se rencontrer les démarches actuellement mises en œuvre dans plusieurs disciplines pour faire avancer la recherche dans le champ émergent des études biographiques, qui fait l’objet d’une attention toute particulière au sein des Humanités. Cette journée d’étude s’inscrit dans une dynamique avec plusieurs autres organisés à l’intérieur et à l’extérieur de cette Université.
(English)
This study day will bring together researchers and PhD students from the Fédération CRISIS, as well as other Faculty members from ALLSH-Aix Marseille Université and other universities, whose work relate to biographical texts. The main aim is to share and compare the approaches developed in various disciplines in the Humanities, all of which are contributing to the emerging field of biographical studies.
JUNE 2016
SAES Conference 2-4 June 2016
Biography Studies Workshop
The Biography Society will be taking part in the SAES conference (Société des Anglicistes de l’Enseignement Supérieur ), 2-4 June 2016 at Lyon III University .
“Biography Studies: An Interdisciplinary Confluence”
Since the end of the last century, a “biographical turn” has occurred in the Humanities, which, after several decades that have been dominated by the “death of the subject”, place the human individual once again at the heart of debates. The development of researches on autobiography and autofiction in literary studies, the methodology of life writing in the social sciences, have characterized the first phase of this movement. Today, Biography Studies appear as a dynamic emerging field, under way of theorization. Researchers in many countries and various disciplines turn to studying the hitherto underestimated genre of biography. Contemporary literature and cinema display a remarkable interest for biofiction and the biopic. In history, biography asserts itself as an innovating mode of historiography. Researchers of several disciplines are pulling together around the recently founded Biography Society (www.biographysociety.org), to animate this new research field and to contribute to its theorization.
AUGUST 2016
SEMINAR “BIOGRAPHY”
ESSE 2016, 22-26 AUGUST IN GALWAY
This seminar invites contributions to the study of biography as a genre, considering that it raises specific issues that distinguish it from autobiography. It would equally be interested in approaches to the practice of biography as a method of academic research, from microhistory to literature and cultural studies. For instance, individual papers may address theoretical questions, case studies of particular biographers’ works, the history and the poetics of biography, the impact of the biographical turn, the evolution of biographical dictionaries, or the innovative influences of the biopic and digital humanities.
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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. Publication of Special Issue on 19th-Century Collaborative Life Writing
I am pleased to announce the publication of a special issue on nineteenth-century collaborative life writing. This issue of the Forum for Modern Language Studies, a journal published by Oxford University Press, is dedicated to the memory of Linda H. Peterson.
Special Issue Co-Constructed Selves: Nineteenth-Century Collaborative Life Writing
Edited by Lynn M. Linder
Forum for Modern Language Studies Volume 52 Issue 2 April 2016
Articles include:
Lynn M. Linder, “Co-Constructed Selves: Nineteenth-Century Collaborative Life Writing, An Introduction”
Stephen C. Behrendt, “‘There is No Second Crop of Summer Flowers’: Mary Leadbeater and Melesina Trench in Correspondence”
Heather Bozant Witcher, “‘With Me’: The Sympathetic Collaboration of Mary Godwin and Percy Bysshe Shelley”
Linda K. Hughes, “‘Given in Outline and No More’: The Shared Life Writing of Anna Jameson and Ottilie von Goethe”
Anne Jamison, “Love Letters (Flaubert and Sand)”
Cynthia Huff, “The ‘Galton Family Books’: Visual and Verbal Life Writing”
Kirsty Bunting, “‘Feelings of Vivid Fellowship’: Vernon Lee and Clementina Anstruther-Thomson’s Quest for Collaborative ‘Aesthetic Sociability’”
Florence S. Boos, “Collaboration and the Victorian Oral Narrative: The Autobiography of a Charwoman”
Content can be accessed online at: http://fmls.oxfordjournals.org/content/current
Best wishes,
Lynn
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Dr. Lynn M. Linder
Assistant Professor
Department of English
West Virginia Wesleyan College
59 College Avenue, Campus Box 38
Buckhannon, WV 26201
304-473-8805
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Last updated: 20 May 2016
