Lives & Letters Mailing: July & August 2020
Dear Colleagues,
Welcome to another Lives & Letters Mailing. This month’s mailing contains information about:
1. South African memorials and statues – a new website joins WWW & OSLO!
2. Whites Writing Whiteness: Project News
– New Reading List – Remaking memory: on statues and memorials
– From the Blog: Sister Nannie resplendent
– From the Blog: On the memorial landscape
– From the Blog: The company-state and sovereignty
– From the Blog: Now you see them… on statues, memorials and public memory
3. ESREA Life History and Biography Conference, 2021
4. Paul John Eakin, Writing Life Writing: Narrative, History, Autobiography, Routledge 2020
5. Addressing ‘The Memoir Problem’ (Creative Panel) (9/30/2020; 3/11-14/2021) Buffalo NY NEMLA
6. Becoming the Obamas: Critical Approaches to Barack & Michelle Obama’s Memoirs (9/30/2020; 3/11-14/2021) Buffalo, New York, NEMLA
7. The Writer as Sociopath (9/30/2020; 3/11-14/2021) NEMLA, Philadelphia, USA
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1. South African memorials and statues – new website!
Dear Colleagues,
Statues and other monuments, and indeed commemoration more generally, are presently much under discussion and in a sense under the symbolic and at times actual hammer. A new website on South African War Memorials has been launched, live from 1 July. This joins the Whites Writing Whiteness website and its companion the Olive Schreiner Letters Online, and is concerned with the many kinds of memorialisation that have followed in the wake of the South African War, including the post-1994 black counter-memorialisation project.
SAWM provides photograph galleries of:
- the memorial sites of the white (actually mixed) concentration camps established during the South African War
- many post-1902 South African memorials
- as an imperial war, memorials to the military dead in Britain
- black freedom struggle memorials and counter-memorialisation commemorations
There are photographs of all sites and short interpretive accounts of each of to the concentration camp commemorative sites, the post-1902 nationalist and other memorials, and the post-1994 black memorials. More detailed and analytical ‘Read about’ guides and publications from the research projects concerned are also provided. Go to: http://www.sawarmemorials.ed.ac.uk/
I would be grateful if you could please pass on this Information to people you think would be interested. Thank you.
Best wishes
Liz Stanley
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2. Whites Writing Whiteness: Project News
There are five items of WWW project news to report on:
New Reading List – Remaking memory: on statues and memorials
The politics surrounding and undergirding statues and memorials and societal responses to them was much in the news when this annotated Reading List was being prepared, associated in large part with Black Lives Matter and public statuary of people associated with slavery. Please click here to see what’s on the reading list, which also provides an introductory essay: https://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/publications/reading-lists/memory-statues/
From the Blog: Sister Nannie resplendent
Anna Tempo has been discussed or mentioned quite a few times on WWW pages. A photograph of her appears on the cover of a 1939 Women’s Christian Temperance Union booklet, ‘Sister Nannie’, written by ‘E.L.C.’. It was taken in 1937 when Anna Tempo was in her early 70s, on the occasion she was awarded the George Medal for her social and rescue work. Please visit the blog to view the photo of Anna and read more about her: https://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/sister-nannie-resplendent/
From the Blog: On the memorial landscape
In these days of falling statues and contested commemoration, an interesting contribution to understanding the complicated array of interests involved is provided by Nettleton and Fubah’s (2019) edited collection on Exchanging Symbols. This edited collection stems from an initiative by South Africa’s Human Sciences Research Council, undertaken in the wake of Rhodes Must Fall protests there and specifically the focus on statues and other forms of memorialisation that can be associated with colonialism. To read more about this, please visit the blog: https://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/memorial-landscape/
From the Blog: The company-state and sovereignty
A previous blog discussed important aspects of a recently published book, Outsourcing Empire by Phillips & Sharman, in particular that it problematises previous understandings of the state. Good ideas also always have progenitors, and Outsourcing Empire takes off from an important contribution made by Philip Stern in The Company-State, published in 2011. This is focused on a long-term archive-based investigation of the British East India Company, while its theoretical structure is concerned with what taking the chartered companies seriously as institutions in their own right leads to, in terms of comprehending and analysing what the state and governance were/are like. To read more about its relevance to thinking about South Africa, please click here: https://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/company-state-and-sovereignty/
From the Blog: Now you see them… on statues, memorials and public memory
Statues and memorials are both largely unseen and also omnipresent aspects of urban landscapes, more rarely existing in rural settings, and they act as what Andreas Huyssen refers to palimpsests. Almost meaningless to most, scratch at their usually ignored surfaces and what comes to sight are the contentions, conflicts and power-plays of the past. To read more, please visit the blog: https://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/memorials-and-public-memory/
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3. ESREA Life History and Biography Conference, 2021
ESREA – European Society for Research on the Education of Adults
Life History and Biography Network
An Ecology of Life: Discourses, dialogue and diversity in biographical research
The Annual Conference in 2021 will be held in
Dolnośląska Szkoła Wyższa/ University of Lower Silesia
Wrocław, Poland
Thursday 4th to Sunday 7th March
First Call for Papers
Since its first meeting in Geneva, ESREA’s Life History and Biography Network (LHBN) has been a forum for a wide range of researchers, including doctoral students, drawing on different disciplinary backgrounds, and coming from every corner of Europe, and beyond.
The Network has been meeting for 28 years, with annual conferences centred on the role of biographical narratives, storytelling, subjectivity and intersubjectivity, as well as memory, in researching human lives and experiences of learning. Thematic and methodological interests, as well as dissatisfaction with dominant research methods and epistemologies, have drawn diverse researchers together, from different contexts, language communities and varying preoccupations. Our conferences are based on the recognition and celebration of the diversity of methods, approaches and epistemologies in researching adult education and learning. Our aim is to create spaces for dialogue, reflexivity and discovery, in order to sustain trustful collaboration, publications and collaborative research projects.
The 2021 conference will draw its inspiration from the forthcoming book ‘An Ecology of Life: Discourses, dialogue and diversity in biographical research’ which forms part of the ESREA book series – ‘Research on the education and learning of adults’. As we did with the book, we want to weave together a variety of contributions and voices on biographical struggles to define and live sustainable lives, located within families, communities, cultures and our relationships to the natural world. We aim to illuminate what amounts to an ecology of life and human flourishing, no less, in a tortured, fractious, and fragmented world.
The conference seeks to interconnect many themes that have been present in our recent work, at least since 2013, to do with how narratives are deeply embodied, and engage heart, maybe soul, as well as mind, as viewed from varying perspectives. Moreover, biographical research is no isolated individual, solipsistic endeavour but is shaped by larger ecological interactions – in families, schools, universities, communities, societies, and landscapes – that can sustain or destroy hope. Sustainability is often to do with creating sufficient hope in individuals and communities by building meaningful dialogue and experience of togetherness, across difference. We have become more aware, in our research meetings, that telling life stories or listening to them celebrates the complexity, messiness, ecological challenge, but also rich potential of living learning lives. By doing biographical research, we became more concerned about the rapid disruption of sustainable ecologies, not only ‘natural’, physical and biological, but also psychological, economic, relational, political, educational, cultural and ethical. We live in a frightening, liquid world and believe that our kind of research can not only chronicle this but also illuminate how resources of hope are created in deeper, aesthetically satisfying ways. Biographical research offers insights, and even signposts, to understand and transcend the darkness of the human condition.
Moreover, note is made of the fact that the Life History and Biography Network is set within a changing conceptual field of adult/lifelong education and learning. Our work is framed (and constrained) by local, national, European and global influences. Particularly, the changing nature of network membership and preoccupations, in the face of neo-liberalism, including in universities and education; and of declining trust in politics, institutions and even the future in Europe and beyond. Rightist populism and fascism are on the march once again. So, our reflection on and reflexivity towards the evolution of our community, and our dilemmas as researchers and adult learners in present times, points to a considered and positive interplay with these wider forces. Our rational is to generate insight into people’s fears and anxieties but also their capacity to keep on keeping on and to challenge forces that would diminish our humanity. We, as researchers, teachers and citizens, are embedded in a liquid, runaway, fractious, anxiety ridden world but have responsibilities to struggle towards something better, grounded in social justice.
In order to make a proposal, and bring your contribution to the conference, you may wish to consider:
- The emergent philosophical and theoretical themes that inform different perspectives on stories, and a panoply of methodological stances.
- The interactions between research, practice, and policy, by presenting pieces of research that have been influenced by a need and/or are aimed at shaping policy and practice – or any mix of these.
- The multiplicity of philosophical, political, theoretical and methodological stances in biographical research, alongside values, assumptions and practices.
We are particularly interested in the role of research as a response to adult lifelong learning opportunities and experiences, alongside the difference that our work can make.
We also hope the conference will integrate the community of researchers of life history and biography after such difficult experiences of social isolation and provide a space that will allow us to reflect on the consequences for human flourishing.
Scientific Committee
Alan Bainbridge, Laura Formenti (conveners of the Network)
Michel Alhadeff-Jones, Herve Breton, Agnieszka Bron, Freema Elbaz-Luwisch, Rob Evans, Fergal Finnegan, Marcin Gołębniak, Ewa Kurantowicz, Silvia Luraschi, José Gonzalez Monteagudo, Marianne Høyen, Barbara Merrill, Laura Mazzoli Smith, Paweł Rudnicki, Linden West and Hazel Wright.
Members of the Scientific Committee will come from Italy, Germany, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom; all are committed to facilitate communication across the different languages, to create a learning inclusive community and to offer good critical space for early as well as expert researchers.
The location of the Conference
The University of Lower Silesia [ULS; orig.: DSW] is a non-public university that promotes an innovative approach to learning and builds research networks at the national and international levels. Apart from the excellence in teaching, research and academic publications, DSW actively works for the local community, in particular through its educational programs, research and development projects and cooperation with educational institutions, culture and civil organizations.
University of Lower Silesia is based not far from the very centre of Wrocław and is well connected with various essential destination points, such as the airport, Wrocław Mikołajów railway station, the coach station and the city’s highway.
Outline Conference schedule
The formal conference starts late afternoon Thursday 4th ends at noon Sunday 7th March.
Details will be provided when confirmed. We hope to include a morning visit to an educational/cultural place in Wroclaw, and also a conference dinner and other attractions.
Abstract submission
Abstracts can be for individual papers or group symposia/workshops.
Abstracts (WORD format) should have no more than 500 words, Times New Roman, 12 points and single spaced.
The title of the abstract should be unambiguous
Your name, institutional affiliation, phone and email should NOT be included in the abstract but be on a separate page.
Schedule:
Deadline for submission of abstracts: 30th October 2018
Notification of acceptance of proposals for papers, symposia, workshops, or posters after a double blind review: mid November 2020.
Deadline for Final papers (3000 – 5000 words) should be submitted by 29thJanuary 2021.
Detailed guidelines for submission, conference arrangements and the conference programme will be made available on the conference website
More details will be sent in the second Call for Papers (around September 2020)
In the meantime, if you have any questions please contact the Wroclaw’s organizing team at: LHBN2021@dsw.edu.pl or
Alan Bainbridge at alan.bainbridge@canterbury.ac.uk
Laura Formenti at laura.formenti@unimib.it
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4. Paul John Eakin, Writing Life Writing: Narrative, History, Autobiography, Routledge 2020
Dear colleagues,
I write to announce that Routledge recently published my book, Writing Life Writing: Narrative, History, Autobiography, with a Foreword by Craig Howes. Below please find a description of the book and a link to Routledge.
–John Eakin
Why do we endlessly tell the stories of our lives? And why do others pay attention when we do? The essays collected here address these questions, focusing on three different but interrelated dimensions of life writing. The first section, “Narrative,” argues that narrative is not only a literary form but also a social and cultural practice, and finally a mode of cognition and an expression of our most basic physiology. The next section, “Life Writing: Historical Forms,” makes the case for the historical value of the subjectivity recorded in ego-documents. The essays in the final section, “Autobiography Now,” identify primary motives for engaging in self-narration in an age characterized by digital media and quantum cosmology.
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“Writing Life Writing: Narrative, History, Autobiography shows how autobiographical narrative works as an essential aspect of humanity. In fresh, exciting ways, it melds literature with psychology, neurobiology, ethics and cultural anthropology, to argue that telling stories about our- selves is psychically and even biologically motivated. Eakin guides us through the fact-fiction tease of the form, its relevance to historians and its future in an age of social media. Eakin’s own experiment with writing autobiographically, which closes this beautifully written collection, will intrigue those who wonder what it is to find a vocation in writing about life writing, distilling with it a life time of thinking about this ever-interesting form and practice.”
—Margaretta Jolly, Professor of Cultural Studies, University of Sussex
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“What a pleasure–and convenience–to have these trenchant and timely essays of the last two decades gathered in one accessible volume! John Eakin is a distinguished American critic of autobiography studies with international reach and resonance, as well as an elegant, witty, and insightful writer. His work has long blazed a trail in theorizing the relationship of the autobiographical to diverse fields: the narrative identity system, where his probing interventions inform debates on it as cultural practice, cognitive process, and embodied representation; the history of autobiography as an evolving mode of representing subjectivity in dialogue with, but distinct from, related literary genres; and the stakes of life writing in emergent digital media and as a model of quantum cosmology. In two additional personal essays on his biological and intellectual fathers, Eakin traces how a lifelong engagement with the discipline has motivated and shaped his own processes of memory and reflection. These essays reward rereading and will enrich current debates.”
— Julia Watson, Professor Emerita of Comparative Studies, The Ohio State University, Co-author with Sidonie Smith of Reading Autobiography: A Guide to Interpreting Life Narrative and Life Writing in the Long Run: A Smith & Watson Autobiography Studies Reader
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“Written with his characteristic lucidity, this selection of key pieces is a reminder, if we needed one, of why Eakin has been so indispensable to the study of life writing for so long: seeing autobiography as not only a textual product but a fundamental human activity, Eakin can appreciate it all its forms and dimensions. Understanding self-narrative as pre-textual, rooted in somatic homeostasis, Eakin is well equipped to surf the waves of change in the way humans produce it in post-print media. Tracing his critical trajectory, this book reveals a mind probing beyond the traditional boundaries of disciplines to illuminate his subject in new and fruitful ways.”
— G Thomas Couser, Professor of English Emeritus, Hofstra University
Paul John Eakin is Ruth N. Halls Professor Emeritus of English at Indiana University. He is the author of Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention (1985); Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography (1992); How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves (1999); and Living Autobiographically: How We Create Identity in Narrative (2008). He is the editor of On Autobiography, by Philippe Lejeune (1989); American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect (1991); and The Ethics of Life Writing (2004).
And here is the link to Routledge.
https://www.routledge.com/Writing-Life-Writing-Narrative-History-Autobiography/Eakin/p/book/9780367439101#toc
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International Auto/Biography Association Worldwide
https://sites.google.com/ualberta.ca/iaba/home
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5. Addressing ‘The Memoir Problem’ (Creative Panel) (9/30/2020; 3/11-14/2021) Buffalo NY NEMLA
Addressing ‘The Memoir Problem’ (Creative Panel)
NeMLA 2021 March 11-14, Buffalo N.Y.
contact email: KPernicano@york.cuny.edu
Addressing ‘The Memoir Problem’: Blocked Memories, Documentary Traces, and Hybrid Forms (Creative Panel)
As memoir continues to be a wildly popular genre in our world today, there are many challenges to writing memory and many stakes to publishing a memoir. In many ways, writing a memoir may be a kind of mythical beast for emerging voices. How does one finish a memoir and what marks its timeliness and closure? This forum seeks to interrogate the expectation of a memoir to follow a traditional narrative arc, to expand genre definitions and to highlight cross-genre work. If memory is object-oriented, why do we expect memoir to be plot-driven? How may object or image centric work take a different approach to scene and narrative-telling? Contemporary innovations in creative nonfiction craft, comics, short forms and documentary poetics may reveal how cross-genre work offers a fruitful place to challenge readers’ expectations and incorporate other disciplines in writing. Many established and emerging voices, leading this work and creating new platforms for writers, are reclaiming their stories through traumas and against injustices and discriminations. As a space for writers to read their work and share in Q&A, a diversity of voices & styles are sought. Submissions of auto-fiction & auto-theory, somehow “memoir-esque,” are also encouraged.
Creative genres may include but are not limited to:
- Memoir, Memoir-esque, Memoir Plus
- Creative Nonfiction, Including Creative Nonfiction Comics & Diary Comics
- Autobiography & Life-Writing
- Poetry & Experimental/Hybrid Forms
- Personal Essay
- Auto-Theory
- Auto-Fiction
Please submit an abstract of 200 to 250 words describing your proposed creative reading by September 30th, 2020, to the submission page: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/18874
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International Auto/Biography Association Worldwide
https://sites.google.com/ualberta.ca/iaba/home
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6. Becoming the Obamas: Critical Approaches to Barack & Michelle Obama’s Memoirs (9/30/2020; 3/11-14/2021) Buffalo, New York, NEMLA
Becoming the Obamas: Critical Approaches to Barack & Michelle Obama’s Memoirs
deadline for submissions: September 30, 2020
Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)
Convention in Buffalo, New York, Mar. 11–14, 2021
contact email: donavanramon@gmail.com
This year marks the 25th anniversary of Barack Obama’s memoir Dreams from My Father (1995). Praised by Toni Morrison and Philip Roth, Obama’s memoir explores his life up to his admission to Harvard Law School in 1988. More recently, 2018 saw the publication of Michelle Obama’s best-selling memoir Becoming, which is the story of her life up through the end of her tenure as first lady. This panel seeks papers that critically explore the major prose works by Barack and Michelle Obama: Becoming, Dreams From My Father, and The Audacity of Hope.
Questions to consider include, but are not limited to:
- How do the Obamas tell their story? What literary devices and/or rhetorical strategies do they employ in their respective works?
- How are their memoirs rooted in the African American literary tradition? Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man clearly influenced Barack Obama’s Dreams, yet who else did Obama invoke in telling his story? Who, if any, are Michelle Obama’s literary influences in Becoming?
- How do the Obamas extend or complicate the specific category of Black Autobiography? How do their texts compare/contrast with other memoirs – either contemporary or canonical texts?
- How does Becoming compare/contrast with Barack Obama’s Dreams of My Father?
- How do the Obamas depict race/racism and/or intersectionality in their texts?
- How can we teach Becoming, Dreams From My Father, and/or The Audacity of Hope to our twenty-first century students?
All submissions that explore the life writings of Barack and/or Michelle Obama will be considered. They do not need to be comparative in scope, though they can be. To submit to this panel, please upload your 250 word abstract to NEMLA’s submission portal at https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/Login.
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International Auto/Biography Association Worldwide
https://sites.google.com/ualberta.ca/iaba/home
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7. The Writer as Sociopath (9/30/2020; 3/11-4/2021) NEMLA, Philadelphia, USA
full name / name of organization: Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)
contact email: abbybardi@gmail.com
This panel will consider the cases of writers who have used their platforms to create fictions of self—to misrepresent, self-justify, even blatantly lie about their own lives and realities. The panel is open to considering any act of writing sociopathy, from memoir (e.g., M.E. Thomas’s 2013 Confessions of a Sociopath or Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal) to fictional works that inhabit the minds of sociopaths (e.g., A Clockwork Orange, Gone Girl) to literary fakers (e.g., James Frey, Danny Santiago, JT LeRoy, Caroline Calloway). Is writing in itself an act of misrepresentation bordering on psychopathy? This panel is asked to investigate such issues as literary hoaxes, memoir and identity, and question of whether writing is inherently a form of the “long con.”
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International Auto/Biography Association Worldwide
https://sites.google.com/ualberta.ca/iaba/home
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Last updated: 31 July 2020
