Lives & Letters Mailing: January 2019
Dear Colleagues,
Welcome to another Lives & Letters Mailing. This month’s mailing contains information about:
1. Whites Writing Whiteness: Project News
– From the Blog: Cathy Riessman Symposium call for papers
– New Trace! Townsend/Hockly marriage record, 20 Dec 1836
– From the Blog: The perennial questions of epistolarity
– From the Blog: Researching, by following one’s nose
– From the Blog: In Eliasian fields
2. Newsletter Biography Institute January 2019
3. New Issue of 19: Silence in the Archives: Censorship and Suppression in Women’s Life Writing
4. On the edges: Autodidacts, forgotten thinkers, silenced women in 20th-century South Africa (1/15/2019; 4/22-23/2019) Cape Town, South Africa
5. CFP African Women in Media 2019 Conference & Festival
6. CFP “Small and large encounters in XIX century” young researchers symposium
7. Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 41, no. 3 Asian American Hip-Hop Auto/Biographies, and Political Biography in Literature and Cinema
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1. Whites Writing Whiteness: Project News
There are five new items of project news to share:
From the Blog: Cathy Riessman Symposium call for papers
The wonderful Cathy Riessman is this month celebrating her 80th birthday. Cathy has made an indelible mark on narrative studies and methodology and among other things, her work has influenced many of the methodological moves that have underpinned Whites Writing Whiteness research. There will be a symposium to celebrate and engage with her work on 29 May this year, in London. The organising committee for this event has issued the call for papers, which is available via the blog: https://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/cathy-riessman-symposium-cfp/
New Trace! Townsend/Hockly marriage record, 20 Dec 1836
The marriage of Edward Townsend and Harriet Hockly took place on Tuesday 20 December 1836 in Bathurst, near Grahamstown, Eastern Cape, and the associated marriage certificate is examined in detail. What does close scrutiny of the Townsend/Hockly marriage record bring into view? And what does building on this by ‘following one’s nose’ (as discussed in a blog on this) add? To read more, please visit the Trace: https://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/traces/townsend-hockly-marriage/
From the Blog: The perennial questions of epistolarity
Hearing some lines from St Paul’s letter to the Romans (Rom. 1) sparked a set of questions concerning the addressee/s, whether Paul himself wrote, and other aspects of letterness. To read on, please visit the blog: https://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/the-perennial-questions-of-epistolarity/
From the Blog: Researching, by following one’s nose
Some fun research started with thinking about Harriet Townsend nee Hockly, using a combination of websites, books on my shelves, files about previous research on my computer. Although doing similar searches before, this one has added some new information now incorporated into WWW research. To read more about this, please visit the blog: https://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/researching-by-following-ones-nose/
From the Blog: In Eliasian fields
The International conference on global interdependencies, on the work of Norbert Elias, took place in Brussels during the first week of December. Emilia and Liz did a presentation in the opening session, to incomprehension on the part of at least some the audience Why talk about South Africa in the 1870s? Why a diary and letters? Why analyse them like this? But the written version is now nearly ready to send to a journal. For more on this, go to: https://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/in-eliasian-fields/
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2. Newsletter Biography Institute January 2019
Annual Report Biography Institute
The annual report 2018 of the Biography Institute is available in Dutch and in English. A printed copy can be ordered via email.
Hans Renders fellow in Canberra
From the end of January to mid-March, Hans Renders works as a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University in Canberra. He teaches at the Life Writing Center there a series of lectures, as well as for the George Rudé Society, The National Library of Australia in Sydney and for the National Center of Biography – Australian Dictionary of Biography. Renders will be temporarily added to the staff of College Arts & Social Sciences.
Ad van Liempt writes biography Albert Gemmeker
The renowned historian Ad van Liempt writes under supervision of prof. Hans Renders and prof. Doeko Bosscher a biography of Albert Gemmeker, commander of the transition camp for jews near the Dutch village of Westerbork. After the war, the legal investigation of his criminal acts took seventeen years in total. The question if Gemmeker knew the fate of the jews produced a huge pile of documents in German archives. Up till now this material was considered to be confident, but for this project Ad van Liempt was given full access.
Biography Jelle Zijlstra praised widely
The biography of Jelle Zijlstra, the subject of Jonne Harmsma’s PhD defense on 29 November, received many laudatory reviews in the Dutch press. For example Meindert Fennema praised the book in his article in NRC Handelsblad. A complete list of the reviews in newspapers and online can be found here.
More information can be found on the website www.biografieinstituut.nl.
For subscribing to and unsubscribing from this newsletter, please email biografie.instituut@rug.nl
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Center for Biographical Research, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa
On Facebook: facebook.com/CBRHawaii
International Auto/Biography Association Worldwide
https://sites.google.com/ualberta.ca/iaba/home
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3. New Issue of 19: Silence in the Archives: Censorship and Suppression in Women’s Life Writing
The nineteenth-century women’s life writing archive is a space rife with gendered intervention. ‘Silence in the Archives: Censorship and Suppression in Women’s Life Writing’ engages with forms of archival spaces ranging between the institutional, the familial, and the imaginary. Five scholarly articles examine the preservation, construction, and censorship of nineteenth-century women’s life writing using a wide range of primary sources and across disciplines including literature, history, art history, and information sciences. These articles examine evidence both incorporated within and peripheral to traditional institutional archives, suggesting that researchers’ materials and methods of interpretation must be creative and interdisciplinary, and that the concept of the ‘archive’ must be stretched beyond its traditional limitations in order to grapple with the many dimensions and remnants of nineteenth-century women’s life writing. A forum section presents new models for mediating and negotiating archival absences in nineteenth-century women’s life writing through digital innovations. The forum also suggests strategies for recovering the doubly silenced voices of nineteenth-century women of colour. This issue of 19 queries women’s role in society in the long nineteenth century across temporalities and contributes to understandings of how the creation and preservation of life writing interacted with women’s evolving domestic, societal, and self-reflexive identities. It does so by examining extant archives and recovery projects relating to both canonical and lesser known women, including Claire Clairmont, Margaret Fuller, Eva Knatchbull-Hugessen, Christina Liddell, Mary Watts, Dora Montefiore, and Margaret Harkness.
Introduction: Reading Silence in the Long Nineteenth-Century Women’s Life Writing Archive
Alexis Wolf
Horrid Mysteries of Cl Cl 26: A Tale of Mothers and Daughters
Elizabeth Campbell Denlinger
Margaret Fuller’s Archive: Absence, Erasure, and Critical Work
Sonia Di Loreto
Silence, Dissent, and Affective Relations in the Juvenile Diaries of Eva Knatchbull-Hugessen (1861-1895)
Kathryn Gleadle
Christina Liddell, the Forgotten Fraser Tytler Sister: Censorship and Suppression in Mary Watt’s Life Writing
Lucy Ella Rose
Censorship and Self-Censorship: Revisiting the Belt Case in the Making of Dora Montefiore (1851-1933)
Karen Hunt
Forum
The Harkives: Cataloguing the Coherence and Complexity of Margaret Harkness/John Law
Lisa C. Robertson, Flore Janssen
‘We the ladies… have been deprived of a voice’: Uncovering Black Women’s Lives through the Coloured Conventions Archive
Samantha de Vera
Afterword
Katherine Newey
To read the latest issue and all previous issues click here: https://www.19.bbk.ac.uk/
Contact Info: Niki Lambert
Contact Email: c19@bbk.ac.uk
URL: https://www.19.bbk.ac.uk/
Center for Biographical Research, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa
On Facebook: facebook.com/CBRHawaii
International Auto/Biography Association Worldwide
https://sites.google.com/ualberta.ca/iaba/home
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4. On the edges: Autodidacts, forgotten thinkers, silenced women in 20th-century South Africa (1/15/2019; 4/22-23/2019) Cape Town, South Africa
We invite papers for this conference to be held at the Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town on 22-23 April 2019.
Although South African historiography has been dominated by university-based intellectuals, many intellectuals operated outside universities, only to be marginalized and hidden from history. This conference places those marginalized intellectuals centre stage, exploring their hitherto neglected work in all its originality and variety. Intellectuals active outside universities ranged from socialist autodidacts to participants in workers’ night schools and radical discussion groups to women sitting silently at political conferences to political activists and trade unionists. Often organic intellectuals from working-class backgrounds, they produced remarkable creative and critical work in many different genres – newspaper articles, political manifestos, popular histories, letters, literature, memoirs, songs and art work.
The conference invites papers addressing the activities and achievements of twentieth-century marginalized intellectuals (both individuals and groups). It will consider the following questions:
- How did twentieth-century South African universities define and constitute intellectuals?
- What individuals were identified as ‘intellectuals’, and what credentials did they require?
- Who was denied the identity and status of ‘intellectual’ and what formal and informal processes excluded them from this status?
- Sidelining and silencing – what were the processes, who were the individuals and how were they affected?
- What constituencies did marginalized intellectuals engage with – political parties, civic organizations, popular movements?
- What was the role of discussion clubs, fellowships, forums, societies and study groups as alternative sites of intellectual development? What types of knowledge and intellectual cultures did they create?
- What was the relationship between university-based intellectuals and intellectuals beyond the academy during the last century?
- What has been the impact of this marginalization on our understanding of intellectual work and the relationship between intellectuals and institutions?
- How do the histories of intellectuals active outside universities illuminate current debates about access to universities?
The recent unrest and ferment at South African universities has highlighted the theme of decolonization. The marginalized intellectuals that the conference will discuss were decolonizing South African history and culture long ago. The conference will broaden the understanding of intellectual work and of the relationship between intellectuals, institutions and society and will illuminate the possibilities offered when historically marginalized intellectuals are brought into the mainstream.
Interested participants should send paper title and abstracts of 250 words by the deadline of 15 January 2019 to conference conveners Allison Drew and Lungisile Ntsebeza at ontheedges2019@gmail.com. We encourage contributions from independent scholars, postgraduate students, academics and activists.
Contact Info:
Professor Allison Drew at allisonvictoriadrew@gmail.com
Professor Lungisile Ntsebeza at lntsebeza@gmail.com
Contact Email: ontheedges2019@gmail.com
Center for Biographical Research, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa
On Facebook: facebook.com/CBRHawaii
International Auto/Biography Association Worldwide
https://sites.google.com/ualberta.ca/iaba/home
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5. CFP African Women in Media 2019 Conference & Festival
African Women in the Media 2019 Conference & Festival
in partnership with African Union Commission
Theme: SHOWCASE
Proposals are invited for a three-day conference and festival in Nairobi, Kenya
Date: 11-13 July, 2019
Venue: Kenya School of Monetary Studies, Nairobi
African Women in the Media, in pursuance of its objective to bring together media practitioners and scholars in the field of media, communications and cultural studies, presents its 3rd annual conference in Nairobi, Kenya. With its theme being SHOWCASE, AWiM 2019 conference and festival will feature keynotes, panels, workshops, exhibitions, film screenings, networking opportunities, the AWiM Pitch Zone hosted by commissioning editors from international and national media organisations, and much more. We will also be launching the AWiM Hackathon as we enter the last two years of African Women’s Decade (2010-2020).
We welcome proposals for papers, panels, workshops and film presentations, from both academic and industry speakers and trainers.
Participants may draw on perspectives from Media, Communications and Cultural Studies, including Journalism, Marketing Communications (Advertising & Branding), Political Communication, Public Relations, Cultural Studies including Film Studies and Production, Performing Arts, Gender Studies, ICTs, Media Education and other such relevant disciplines.
Furthermore, participants are invited to consider the following themes as it related to media in Africa:
- Addressing African Women’s Decade (AWD) objectives
- Media & Audience response to continental initiatives and global movements like #MeToo
- Innovation in media content and delivery
- Challenging negative patterns in representation of women in Africa
- Issues of access, independence and public interest
- Addressing gender gaps and equality in the industry and representation of gender equality in media content
- Identifying enabling business models for African media
Topical areas of interest to reflect on include (but not limited to) the following:
- Access and Citizen Empowerment
- Advertising and Privacy
- Alternative Audiences
- Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Learning
- Blockchain, Empowerment and Media
- Communication and Development
- Communities and Networks
- Digital Empowerment
- Diversity and Inclusion
- Ethics and Trust
- Fake News and Truth
- Feminism and Political Participation
- Gender Mainstreaming and Policies
- iHealth
- International Law and Human Rights
- Media Entrepreneurship and Leadership
- Media, Technology and Robotics
- New Art
- Post-Truth
- Post-Human
- Religion and Conflict
- Representation
- Terrorism
- Transmedia
- Sustainability and Environment
- Women Entrepreneurship
- Young Audiences
Please send abstracts of 150 words and a short bio by Monday 18 January 2019 to: Dr Yemisi Akinbobola (cfp@africanwomeninmedia.com, yemisi@africanwomeninmedia.com)
Confirmed Keynote Speakers
Dr Dorothy Njoroge
Dr Njoroge is an Assistant Professor of Journalism at the Unites States International University (USIU), Kenya, and Chair of Association of Media Women in Kenya (AMWIK). She holds a PhD in Media Studies from Southern Illinois University, USA, and has several yeas of experience in communications and development for various NGOs.
Lola Omolola, Founder, Female IN (FIN)
Lola Omolola is a Chicago-based Community Engagement Strategist who has successfully mobilised over one million women for her Facebook group Female In (formerly Female in Nigeria). She has two decades of experience working in radio, TV and digital project management. FIN has become an effective platform for social change, and Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg highlighted Lola and FIN as a model for building meaningful communities.
Key Dates
The deadline for submitting abstracts is Monday 28 January 2019 at 23.59 GMT
- 18 December 2018 – Abstract submission opens
- 7 January 2019 – Early Bird registration opens
- 28 January 2019 – Deadline to submit abstracts
- 11 February 2019 – Decisions on abstracts are announced
- 08 March 2019 – Deadline for participation confirmation
- 08 April 2019 – Draft of conference schedule
- 10 May 2019 – Early bird registration closes
- 10 June 2019 Full paper submission deadline
- 11-13 July 2019 AWiM19 Conference & Festival
Please send abstracts of 150 words and a short bio by Monday 18 January 2019 to: Dr Yemisi Akinbobola (cfp@africanwomeninmedia.com, yemisi@africanwomeninmedia.com)
British Council Research Grant
The British Council is now accepting expressions of interest for research grant for UK based arts organisations / curators / programmers working in any of the following art forms – Visual Arts, Literature, Music, Theatre, Dance, Architecture, Design, Fashion and Film to travel to Sub-Saharan Africa. The objectives of the visit should be to connect with the local contemporary art sectors, and undertake their own professional research to be shared with a wider UK sector in their chosen field. The trips should take place between April 2019 and March 2020. The grant is open for applications between 10th December 2018 and 8th March 2019 with announcements tentatively set for the 25th of March. Submissions should be emailed to Mabel.Kebirungi@britishcouncil.or.ug by 18:00 (GMT) on 8 March 2019.
For more information: https://www.britishcouncil.org/arts/partner/sub-saharan-africa
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6. CFP “Small and large encounters in XIX century” young researchers symposium
Dear all,
to my best wishes for the new year I add the CFP for the young researchers symposium “Small and large encounters in XIX century” to be held in Paris on June 20th and 21st. Deadline to send abstracts is February 20th. Goes without saying, feel free to share with interested colleagues.
Best,
Edoardo // AIR
AIR – Atelier Ideas & Research
20/02/19 – Paris (FR). CFP “Small and large encounters in XIX century”
Call for papers for the 1st young researchers symposium of the Rencontres du XIX siècle about “small and large encounters in XIX century“. Aim of the Rencontres du XIXe siècle is to gather young researchers (phD and postdoc) around a wide range of topics and beyond specific historiographic approaches. The symposium is organized by young researchers belonging to more than 10 different labs. This is why we chose the general theme of “encounters” to explore, with this first meeting, various dimensions of XIX century.
WHEN / WHERE
The symposium will be held in Paris on June 19-20th 2019.
TOPICS
the following is a non-exhaustive list of topics:
- How encounters happen:
- Random or organized, direct and indirect, with or without follow-up, individual or collective, private or public, official and non-official encounters.
- Means and technologies of encounters: correspondences, translations, duels, debates, transportation, transfers.
- Where and when encounters happen:
- Far-reaching encounters: travels, exiles, diplomatic, ethnographic, religious missions, wars and battlefields, discoveries and explorations.
- Encounters and everyday life: family, urban and rural networks, neighborhoods, clubs, associations, shops, salons, universal expositions, business encounters.
- Who encounters who?
- Ideological and professional encounters, commercial and scientific meetings: transmission, sharing or confrontation of knowledge, expertise, and ideas.
- Political encounters with the State and institutions (administration, elections, military, diplomatic and colonial encounters); political encounters against the State (collective mobilization, militancy, propaganda, non-conventional or illegal protests, slave trade, piracy, trials and legal encounters.
APPLICATION & DEADLINE
Proposals (2.000 signs) and posters are to be sent to rencontres19eme@gmail.com before February 28th 2019, along with a short CV. Proposals can be in French or English. Selection will be communicated on March 31st.
COMMITTEE
- Lisa Bogani (Université Clermont Auvergne)
- Lisa Castro (Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès)
- Clément Fabre (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne)
- Tatiana Fauconnet (École normale supérieure de Lyon)
- Edoardo Frezet (Université Côte d’Azur)
- Alexandre Frondizi (Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne)
- Anthony Hamon (Université Rennes 2)
- Viera Rebolledo-Dhuin (Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin en Yvelines)
- Nicolas Tardits (Université Paris Ouest Nanterre)
- Pietro Giovanni Trincanato (Université Paris-Est Créteil et Università degli Studi di Milano)
- Benoît Vaillot (EHESS / European University Institute / Université de Strasbourg)
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7. Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 41, no. 3 Asian American Hip-Hop Auto/Biographies, and Political Biography in Literature and Cinema
Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly
vol. 41, no. 3 • Summer 2018
Editor’s Note
Roderick N. Labrador & Brian Su-Jen Chung, guest editors
Asian American Hip-Hop Musical Auto/Biographies
Roderick N. Labrador
“Freaky” Asian Americans, Hip-Hop, and Musical Autobiography: An Introduction
This introduction uses the life, music, and autobiography of Fresh Kid Ice (from the 2 Live Crew) to frame a central objective in this themed cluster of essays, titled “Asian American Hip-Hop Musical Auto/Biographies,” which extends our understanding of how hip-hop, and more specifically rap, in Asian America are forms of musical autobiography. Along with the contributions in the cluster, this introductory essay begins productive conversations between Asian American studies, hip-hop studies, and life writing studies. Asian American hip-hop musical autobiographies can offer alternative ways for imagining and unsettling a politics of Asian American identity and cultural production in the context of global capitalism, neoliberalism, and hip-hop culture industries as they intersect with Blackness and anti-Blackness, gender, sexuality, multiracial space and place, refugee diasporas, and linguistic
expressions.
Kenneth Chan
“Bad Gal” and the “Bad” Refugee: Refugee Narratives, Neoliberal Violence, and Musical Autobiography in Honey Cocaine’s Cambodian Canadian Hip-Hop
This project employs a close textual reading of Cambodian Canadian hip-hop artist Honey Cocaine’s 2016 music video “Bad Gal.” Drawing from the fields of Critical Refugee Studies, comparative racialization, and neoliberal critique, I delineate the processes of gendered racialization for the Cambodian diasporic subject, and begin to unpack its racialized relationship to Blackness. In observing “Bad Gal” for its audiovisual content, temporal narrative, themes of deviance and Blackness, as well as supplemented by historical and spatial contexts, and interviews with Honey Cocaine, I argue that the construction of the “bad gal” or “bad refugee” persona is racialized through the genre of hip-hop and Blackness, and acts as a way for the Cambodian diasporic subject to negotiate against neoliberal logics and binary discourses of the “good” versus “dysfunctional” refugee. Through engaging with a cultural studies lens, this project encourages a reading of Asian diasporic hip-hop that complicates static understandings around authenticity, appropriation, and race relations, and to read the texts for their contradictions in revealing the ways it negotiates systems of neoliberalism, rather than to assess work for their “critical” or “politically resistive” value.
Mark Redondo Villegas
Redefined What Is Meant to Be Divine: Prayer and Protest in Blue Scholars
This article examines the biographical narrations of spiritual redemption in Blue Scholars (2004), the debut album of the Seattle-based hip-hop duo the Blue Scholars. The article shows how the album inherits the soulfulness of the avant-garde community group isangmahal arts kollective, which itself emerged from a sprawling network of experimental Filipino American creative communities in the 1990s. As a nostalgic homage to these communities, Blue Scholars gives evidence of the mutuality between themes of spiritual redemption and leftist political agitation in Filipino American cultural politics. The article argues that a new Asian American culture of defiance (as seen in the Asian Pacific Islander American Spoken Word and Poetry Summit) is indebted to a tradition of Filipino American decolonial spiritual politics as documented in Blue Scholars.
Ruben Enrique Campos III
The Posse Cut as Autobiographical Utterance of Place in the Night Marchers’ Three Dots
Two hundred and forty years after contact and one hundred twenty years after the overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom, the process and project of conquest continues. Hawai‘i’s Indigenous people and settler populations remain caught in a tense, back-and-forth process of place-making and identity formation. The poles of Native and settler exist in the same time and place, reflected in the land and lyrical life writing as if two turntables were playing very different songs synced to the same BPM, their peaks and valleys complementing each other, the horizon of their soundscape always competing. Understanding Hawai‘i thus requires the crossfade—the constant movement between two decks. In 2012, the Night Marchers, a local and Hawaiian hip-hop posse, released their debut album Three Dots, across which, Indigenous, Asian settler, and Black diasporic rap artists crossfaded across their tense geography through overlapping verses and dialogic life writing. The complexities of their work together, understood as synced but choppy, reveals the dense layers of Hawai‘i’s rich, symbolic, and politically overdetermined landscape.
Genevieve Leung and Melissa Chen
(Re)Writing Contemporary Cantonese Heritage Language and Identity:Examining MC Jin’s ABC Album
Debuting in 2001, Cantonese-English bilingual rapper Jin Au-Yeung, better known as MC Jin, has been a longstanding figure in the Asian American hip-hop community. His professional and personal journey has taken him from his birthplace of Miami to Hong Kong, where he became a household name, to New York, where he currently resides with his wife and young son. Some have viewed Jin and his language use through the deficit lens of his incomplete Cantonese language acquisition. We argue, however, that his so-called “kitchen language,” or the perceived reduction of his linguistic productive domain to merely household objects and phrases, as well as his “return home” to Hong Kong, are actually poignant heuristics to literally and interactionally perform transnational Chinese American identity and masculinity across time and space. Through examining the songs from Jin’s 2007 album, ABC, we discuss the various tropes Jin utilizes to stake claims on and narrate authenticity relating to the Hong Kong Cantonese (American) experience. Viewing Jin’s lyrics and his collaborations with Asian American celebrities and hip-hop artists as auto/biographical texts, we discursively analyze his autonomy of self-expression and narration of identity through hip-hop. We also discuss the ways these narratives map onto larger discourses of AsianA merican identities. Ultimately, we argue that Jin is a pioneering mediator who reconfigures modern geographies of Asia/Asian America by (re)writing what it means to be a contemporary heritage speaker of Cantonese, providing new and powerful resonances to bilingual prose and expression.
Brian Su-Jen Chung
Narrating Failure: MC Jin’s Return to Rap in the United States
When MC Jin returned to the United States in 2012 after a four-year stint as a Hong Kong entertainer, US media was fixated on a particular narrative of his “failed” opportunity to be one of the first Asian American rap stars nearly a decade prior. This essay examines how MC Jin himself explains his interest in rap as a source of Asian American identity and kinship formation. His self-narratives both respond to and prompt media coverage of failure as a racial discourse in MC Jin’s biography as a rap artist. I argue that MC Jin revises existing knowledge of his biography, which counters the model-minority logic attributed to Asian American rap stardom and resignifies “failure” as an ongoing dialogue to explore, develop, and imagine new ways of becoming Asian American.
David A. M. Goldberg
Beats, Rhymes, and Life in the Ocean of Sound: An Object-Oriented Methodology for Encountering Rap Music
In this article I propose a prototype analytic framework for rap that 1) foregrounds the phenomenological and aesthetic encounter with the sonic energy that remains the core experience of rap music; and 2) considers that encounter without segregating vocals, lyrics, and music. I draw on philosopher Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology and experimental musician Paul Schaeffer’s technique of “reduced listening” to decenter the emcee in a nonhierarchical, desegregated approach to sound. This approach is intended to generate fresh vectors for listener and creator subjectivity that are based on how individual words, sounds, textures, and rhythms are stored within and transmitted by the mechanics of the rap composition. I test my phenomenological approach using three works by Asian American hip-hop artists whoseculturally specific autobiographical narratives are carried and articulated by soundscapes that adhere to and depend on Black aesthetic priorities. Playing with and against Halife Osumare’s hip-hop ontology of “connective marginalities” and critical works by poet Thien-Bao Thuc Phi and scholar Oliver Wang, I hope to destabilize rap’s ethnocentrism by “getting down” to the molecules of sound, where race and individual identity are emergent but not inevitable or primary properties of rap’s sonic complexes. By encouraging the analysis of rap at smaller and shorter scales of syllables and snare hits and larger scales of genre transpositions, I hope to excavate standards of production and performance that, though African American in origin, have not only been established by hip-hop itself but transformed and contributed to by all of its participants.
Joanny Moulin & Delphine Letort, guest editors
Political Biography in Literature and Cinema
Delphine Letort and Joanny Moulin
Introduction to Political Biography in Literature and Cinema
This short introduction proposes to look at the growing impact of contemporary biographical films on political life, more particularly on the collective mental representations of political figures. Compared to print biographies, biographical films focus on significant periods of the subjects’ lives, and even more on specific issues or debates related to those, to propose discursive statements on certain crucial questions of general interest. Envisaging film biographies through the perspective of their more recent evolution, which goes far beyond the historically situated form still more or less implied by the term “biopic,” this introduction goes on to reflect on the different aesthetic perceptions of fictionalization in film and print. Finally, it offers brief summaries of the articles gathered in this cluster.
Rémi Fontanel
French Television and Political Biography
This article focuses on the specificities of political biopics created by French television. First, this essay offers an overview of French televised fictional biography as it was forged over time on the narrative treatment of historical figures (Léon Blum, Charles De Gaulle, Georges Pompidou, François Mitterrand, Simone Veil, etc.) and facts (Popular Front, resistance fighting during the war, political campaigns, May ‘68, legalizing abortion, etc.). The second part of this survey focuses more particularly on the subjects of recent productions (2000s and after), which explore new types of writing, for example by utilizing archival documents that enrich the biopic genre. Finally, this contribution questions the different political stakes of the biopic as a historical and cultural representation of the French nation.
Nicole Cloarec
Recasting the Iron Lady into Flesh and Blood: Gender Performance and
Politics in Three Thatcher Biopics
This article analyzes how three Margaret Thatcher biopics, produced twenty years or so after she stepped down from power, have portrayed the highly controversial former British Prime Minister. In keeping with the conventional approach of the biopic genre, the three films typically shift focus from the public to the private figure, but they also bring a more specific answer, reading Thatcher’s career from a gendered perspective. Thus the films “humanize” their main character by “feminizing” her, but this perspective also allows Thatcher’s image to be deconstructed through the notion of gender and political performance. Ultimately, the films turn the political figure into a proper heroine within different generic conventions that all share proleptic and dramatic irony as their main propelling narrative device.
Françoise Coste
Writing the Life of Ronald Reagan: An Impossible Mission? 654
Few American academics have written biographies of Ronald Reagan. The field remains wide open and is dominated by conservative hagiographers, the political reporter Lou Cannon, and an official biographer, Edmund Morris, who channeled his writer’s block into fiction. This article analyzes how a French Reagan scholar had to navigate such complex sources to write an academic biography of the fortieth president of the United States.
Gertjan Willems
From Political Biography to Political Event: The Daens Myth in Literature and Cinema
This article examines how Louis Paul Boon’s historical novel Pieter Daens (1971) and Stijn Coninx’s biopic Daens 1992) have contributed to the “Daens myth,” in which the Belgian priest and politician Adolf Daens is idealized as a self-assured hero fighting social injustice. The article focuses on how Daens is related to Flemish nation-building and how the political biopic became a political event itself.
Reviews
Political Life Writing in the Pacific: Reflections on Practice, edited by Jack Corbett and Brij V. Lal
Reviewed by Alexander Mawyer
Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their Lives, by Leigh Gilmore
Reviewed by Sarah Brophy
Picture Bride Stories, by Barbara F. Kawakami
Reviewed by Kelli Y. Nakamura
“How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?”: Women and Jewish American
Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs, by Tahneer Oksman
Reviewed by Roberta Mock
Gendered Testimonies of the Holocaust: Writing Life, by Petra M. Schweitzer
Reviewed by Batsheva Ben-Amos
Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age: Survivors’ Stories and New Media Practices, by Jeffrey Shandler
Reviewed by Sarah Jefferies
Back to the Blanket: Recovered Rhetorics and Literacies in American Indian Studies, by Kimberly G. Wieser
Reviewed by Lisa King
Corrigendum
Ronald Suresh Roberts
Nadine Gordimer and the Vices of Biography: A Reply to Hedley Twidle
Contributors
Center for Biographical Research, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa
On Facebook: facebook.com/CBRHawaii
International Auto/Biography Association Worldwide
https://sites.google.com/ualberta.ca/iaba/home
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Last updated: 11 January 2019
