Lives & Letters Mailing: November 2017

Dear Colleagues,

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

1. Whites Writing Whiteness: Project News
– New Trace! ‘Afford my Country an infinite Advantage’ 9 June 1795
– New Trace! ‘Get the boys for me’, 14 February 1898
– New Curiosity! Where there’s a Will, there’s a way?
– From the Blog: Concerning a letter, to three wives
– From the Blog: The Balfour Declaration
2. ANNOUNCEMENT: New book Curated Stories
3. Life Writing in the Anthropocene (9/1/2018) Special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies
4. Identity, Belonging and Activism in the 21st century – CfP
5. FREE ACCESS to Life Writing 14.2 (June 2017) – Writing Romantic Lives
6. Different Lives: Global Perspectives on Biography in Public Cultures and Societies (12/20/2017; 9/19-21/2018)
7. The Perspective of Historical Sociology – free chapter

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1. Whites Writing Whiteness: Project News

There are five new items of project news we would like to share:

1. New Trace! ‘Afford my Country an infinite Advantage’ 9 June 1795
Discussion concerns a letter by Robert Brooke, governor of St Helena (one of the most remote places in the world). This is addressed to Lord (George) Macartney, a career diplomat in process of being appointed to a governor role in the Cape. Drawing on contextual details and also specifics from the letter itself, this trace investigates the letter’s significance in terms of events transpiring in the Cape at that time. A photograph of the letter’s first page along with a complete transcript of the letter are also included. To read more, please visit the trace: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/traces/afford-my-country-an-infinite-advantage/

2. New Trace! ‘Get the boys for me’, 14 February 1898
This trace discusses a letter to David Forbes junior from Dundas Simpson, who was associated with a Johannesburg mine, with part of his role being to ensure a regular supply of labour. A transcript and photograph of the original letter are included, along with details concerning the context of its writing. Discussion explores interesting questions about race and ‘boys’. To read more, please visit the trace: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/traces/get-the-boys-for-me/

3. New Curiosity! Where there’s a Will, there’s a way?
Wills raise interesting questions relevant to WWW research concerning lineage, connection and property within the white communities of South Africa. Drawing on the Wills of Dods Pringle and Elizabeth Hockly, this curiosity considers the question of whether a Will can be seen as a kind of letter, or as stretching the boundaries of what a letter is, or as opening up some border crossings occurring between letters and Wills. To read more, please visit the curiosity: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/curiosities/where-theres-a-will/

4. From the Blog: Concerning a letter, to three wives
This blog concerns temporality concerning a film called ‘A Letter to Three Wives’, directed by Joseph Mankiewicz and distributed in 1949. It is a comedy in which three wives, when together, receive a joint letter saying that one of their husbands has run off with the letter-writer and they will find out which husband this is by the end of the day. Could such a film be made now, and could such letters be written now? To read more, please visit the blog: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/concerning-a-letter-to-three-wives/

5. From the Blog: The Balfour Declaration
Written on the centenary of the Balfour Declaration, the blog considers the appearance of the Declaration within the frame of a letter, some specifics of its writing and also contextual details.
To read more, please visit the blog: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/a-deed-done/

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2. ANNOUNCEMENT: New book Curated Stories

Curated Stories: The Uses and Misuses of Storytelling
By Sujatha Fernandes

Storytelling has proliferated today, from TED Talks and Humans of New York to a plethora of story-coaching agencies and consultants. These narratives are typically heartbreaking accounts of poverty, mistreatment, and struggle that often move us deeply. But what do they move us to? And what are the stakes in the crafting and use of storytelling?

In Curated Stories, Sujatha Fernandes considers the rise of storytelling alongside the broader shift to neoliberal, free-market economies. She argues that stories have been reconfigured to promote entrepreneurial self-making and restructured as easily digestible soundbites mobilized toward utilitarian ends. Fernandes roams the globe and returns with stories from the Afghan Women’s Writing Project, the domestic worker and undocumented student legislative campaigns in the United States, and the Misión Cultura project in Venezuela. She shows how the conditions under which stories are told, the tropes through which they are narrated, and the ways in which they are responded to may actually disguise the deeper contexts of global inequality. Curated stories shift the focus away from structural problems and defuse the confrontational politics of social movements.

Not just a critical examination of contemporary use of narrative and its wider impact on our collective understanding of pressing social issues, Curated Stories also explores how storytelling might be reclaimed to allow for the complexity of experience to be expressed in pursuit of transformative social change.

“Sujatha Fernandes develops a compelling political economy of storytelling in this book. Richly constituted by careful attention to the instrumental importance and uses of stories of marginalized peoples, Curated Stories is at once immersed in the critical literature on stories and storytelling, globalization, and social history; it is in this sense a model of the best of interdisciplinary scholarship.”
–Kandice Chuh, Professor of English and American Studies, Graduate Center, CUNY

“In a well thought out, brilliantly written book, Sujatha Fernandes engages readers in conversation about domestic labor, undocumented migrants, and other important issues. The hard work of devising strategy and forming coalitions forces us to ask: Whose movement is it? Who gets to frame and shape the narrative? Fernandes reminds us that the answers matter greatly to achieving real social change.”
–Christine Lewis, Secretary/Cultural Outreach Coordinator of Domestic Workers United

Order online at www.oup.com/academic
with promotion code ASFLYQ6 to save 30%!
September 2017
Paperback | 232 Pages
978-019-9-061805-6
$24.95 $17.46 USD
£16.99 £11.80 GBP

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3. Life Writing in the Anthropocene (9/1/2018) Special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies

CFP: Life Writing in the Anthropocene

A special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies #abstudies

Guest Editors: Jessica White & Gillian Whitlock
The University of Queensland

We have entered the age of the Anthropocene, a time when our environment has been substantially shaped by humans, rather than vice versa. It is an age marked by environmental decline and extinction: the last forty years have witnessed the irrevocable disappearance of half the world’s vertebrates; sixty percent of the world’s wild primates are facing extinction; and the geographic range of Australia’s iconic gum trees is threatened to shrink by half within the next sixty years. Given these statistics, it is timely to consider the intertwining of our selves with our ecology, particularly given the historically anthropocentric focus on auto/biography.

a/b: Auto/Biography Studies seeks original articles for a special issue on “Life Writing in the Anthropocene” to be published as volume 35.1. How can autobiography, a form which has traditionally dwelled upon representations of the human self, extend to representations of non-human lives? How do we write about the impact which our life has upon other lives? Can we describe the non-human without anthropomorphising it? What is the role of literature in illuminating the non-human and its importance to our selves? How can we articulate relationships with non-human lives in ways that underscore their significance?

The need to address such questions is becoming increasingly urgent in this new epoch. With this in mind, we welcome contemplation of the representation and imagining of non-human and human selves in the Anthropocene. Articles might canvas the following:

• representations of ecosystems and identity formation
• the prevalence of narratives about grief and environment or, more largely, the role of emotion in our literary entwinement with nature
• the imagination and articulation of extinct lives
• the meaningful representation of lives in the span of deep time, given the insignificance of human time against this scale
• the impact of colonisation upon ecosystems, particularly in consideration of constitution of Indigenous selves and communities
• the possibilities of digital enmeshments with environment
• distinctions between communal and singular selves
• issues of style or genre, such as ecobiography or eco-memoir
• lives in urban ecologies
• depictions of non-human lives and/or ecosystems
• Indigenous and non-Indigenous representations of landscapes and country
• the composition of posthuman selves and their environments

This issue is an exciting opportunity to bring non-human lives into conversations about life writing. We welcome essays from a wide range of disciplines, including the humanities, social sciences, sciences and creative arts. Cross-fertilisation of disciplines is also warmly welcomed.

Essays should be 6,000-8,000 words including citations. Citations should be in MLA 8th edition. Please include a coversheet with your name, contact details, and a brief biographical statement. Authors must also include a short abstract and two to four keywords with their submissions. Images with captions should be submitted in a separate file as 300 dpi (or higher) tif files. 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. All essays submitted for the special issue, but not selected, will be considered general submissions.

Submissions are due 1st September 2018. Please email submissions to the guest editors: Jessica White jessica.white@uq.edu.au and Gillian Whitlock g.whitlock@uq.edu.au. Inquiries welcome.

Biographical Statements:

Dr Jessica White is the author of A Curious Intimacy (Penguin, 2007) and Entitlement (Penguin, 2012). Her short fiction, essays and poetry have appeared widely in literary journals and she is the recipient of funding, residencies and numerous awards. Jessica is currently an Australia Research Council DECRA postdoctoral fellow at The University of Queensland, where she is writing an ecobiography of nineteenth-century Australian botanist Georgiana Molloy.

Professor Gillian Whitlock is a Professor of English in the School of Communication and Arts at The University of Queensland and a Fellow of the Academy of the Humanities. She is the author of a series of monographs on life writing, including Postcolonial Life Narratives. Testimonial Transactions (OUP, 2015) and Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit (Chicago UP, 2007), as well as numerous chapters and articles. Her current project focuses on asylum seeker narratives from the Pacific.

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IABA-L: A LIST FOR LIFE WRITING
International Auto/Biography Association
https://sites.google.com/ualberta.ca/iaba/home

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4. Identity, Belonging and Activism in the 21st Century

CALL FOR PAPERS
February 24, 2018

Venue: University of Nottingham
Abstract Deadline: December 8, 2017

How do the pressures of austerity, migration and populism impact on identity and belonging in the 21st century?

What is the emotional cost of maintaining the ‘self’ in circumstances of marginalisation and feelings of ‘unbelonging’?

How are identities challenged by multiple sites of oppression and new threats to community and solidarity?

How does individual and collective action influence policy and bring about social change in this context?

Identity and belonging are dynamic sociological concepts illuminating the ways in which individuals navigate the effects of local and global inequalities. The lived experiences of individuals offer important insights into effects of ‘(un)belonging’ and the maintenance of the ‘self’.

We invite doctoral and early career researchers to present on these and related questions at the 10th Anniversary Enquire Conference. We welcome abstracts on empirical and theoretical research which could be based on, but not limited to, the following areas:

• ‘Race’ & ethnicity
• Disability
• Gender
• Social class
• Migration
• Sexuality
• Technology
• Place & space
• Political activism
• Age
• The body
• Globalisation
• Social citizenship
• Social Policy
• Education
• Intersectionality

This is a one-day event, costing £10, to be held on Saturday 24th February 2018, with keynote speakers including Professor Anne-Marie Fortier (Lancaster) and Dr Elisabetta Zontini (Nottingham). We welcome abstracts of 250-350 words in length for presentations of 15 minutes, to be submitted to enquire@nottingham.ac.uk by 8th December 2017. We look forward to hearing from you.

Berrin Altin Soran, Erica Miles & Ruth Tarlo
The Enquire Conference Team http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/sociology/research/enquire/
School of Sociology and Social Policy
University of Nottingham

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5. FREE ACCESS to Life Writing 14.2 (June 2017) – Writing Romantic Lives

Dr Felicity James, Leicester University, co-editor with Dr Julian North of Life Writing vol 14.2 (June 2017) is to be the keynote speaker at a symposium co-hosted by Edge Hill and Keele Universities on 25th November on the subject of ‘Writing Romantic Lives’. To coincide with the symposium, the entire edition of Life Writing 14.2 (‘Writing Lives Together: Romantic and Victorian Auto/biography’) is available via free access until the end of the year:

http://explore.tandfonline.com/content/ah/rlwr-writing-romantic-lives

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IABA-L: A LIST FOR LIFE WRITING
International Auto/Biography Association
https://sites.google.com/ualberta.ca/iaba/home

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6. Different Lives: Global Perspectives on Biography in Public Cultures and Societies (12/20/2017; 9/19-21/2018)

Conference Different Lives Global Perspectives on Biography in Public Cultures and Societies
September 19-21, 2018

Call for papers
On September 19-21, 2018, the Biography Institute of the University of Groningen will host a conference designed to take a look beyond our own borders and delve deeper into the question of how the art of biography is practiced in other parts of the world. Biographers from different continents will gather to examine the ways in which their foreign colleagues practice their craft and discuss the cultural perspectives that guide biographers in their approach to the infinite complexity of the other.

Different Lives: Global Perspectives on Biography in Public Cultures and Societies will bring together biographers from France, Great Britain, Vietnam, South Africa, China, the United States, the Netherlands, and other nations, whose work reflect the global diversity of biographical practice. For the participants, it will provide an opportunity to learn about international research in the field.
In addition to Richard Holmes’ adage ‘biography as a handshake across time’, we would like to know how biography can contribute to a better understanding of differences between societies and cultures.

How can biographers from different parts of the world learn from each other, without becoming all the same? For this purpose we call on our speakers to inform us about the history and the state of the art concerning biography in their own countries. By doing so, speakers can show how in their cultural background biography functions as a public genre, featuring specific societal issues and opinion-making. Presumably, this could lead to a different thinking about the role of biography in society.

To contribute to the discussion about the national perspectives in biography, the following subjects thus can be explored:

• Religion
• Current topics in biography
• Societal pioneers (‘untimely individuals’)
• Censorship
• Biographical criticism
• Access to archives
• Foreign biography in each country
• The publishing world
• Transnational similarities
• Biography in public space

The conference will be organized by the Biography Institute and the Biography Society. Owing to these organizations’ expansive networks, a broad group of prominent researchers and biographers will be present. Richard Holmes will give the keynote lecture and Nigel Hamilton will host a masterclass on Biography.

Abstracts are due on December 20: 12:00, 2017 and must be submitted via bioconferencegroningen@rug.nl

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IABA-L: A LIST FOR LIFE WRITING
International Auto/Biography Association
https://sites.google.com/ualberta.ca/iaba/home

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7. The Perspective of Historical Sociology – free chapter

Hi all,

We’ve just published a new book that I think might be of interest to members of this list. We’ve also made a chapter from the book available free to read online.

The Perspective of Historical Sociology
The Individual as Homo-Sociologicus Through Society and History

By Jiří Šubrt, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic

Read chapter 5 “Civilizational Analysis”:
https://www.book2look.com/book/AlHZZtFXl9

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the range of themes which make up the field of Historical Sociology. Jiří Šubrt systematically discusses the main problems of societal development, long term process and changes in the key areas of social life. These include not only temporalized sociology, evolutionary theory, civilizational analysis, societal systems, structures and functions, but also modernization and revolution, risk, crisis, catastrophe and collapse, wars, conflicts and violence, nations, nationalism and collective memory. This study does not ignore the fundamental dichotomy underlying the discipline, which is between individualism and holism.

At the heart of this book lies the human individual as related to social and historical development. The key question is who or what is responsible for the process of human history: society or the individual? The author concludes by offering an approach which may help in resolving this dilemma.

Save 30% on this book with web code EMERALD30 at http://books.emeraldinsight.com/page/detail/?K=9781787433649

Best wishes,

Sarah

Sarah Broadley | Marketing Manager
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Last updated: 17 November 2017

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