Lives & Letters Mailing: March 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: Go for it – on reaching readers not bankrolling publishers
– From the Blog: More Elias on Mozart
– From the Blog: Epistolary biography and the letters of Mozart
– From the Blog: The importance of context
– From the Blog: Randlord bearing gifts
2. Life Writing and Celebrity: Exploring Intersections–Life Writing, Volume 16, Issue 2, June 2019 is now available.
3. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies33.3 Autumn 2018Special Issue: Lives Outside the Lines: Gender and Genre NOW AVAILABLE
4. Symbolic Interaction Special Issue Call for Papers
5. Call for Book Proposals for the Real Lives in Global Perspective Series
6. Writing Through… The Australasian Association of Writing Programs’ 24th Annual Conference (4/8/2019; 11/25-27/2019) Sydney, Australia
7. Psychosis of Whiteness: Screenings in London
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1. Whites Writing Whiteness: Project News
There are five new items of project news we would like to share:
From the Blog: Go for it – on reaching readers not bankrolling publishers
Back in the mists of time and irritated by something I can no longer remember, and a very temporary junior lecturer in Sociology at the University of Manchester, I started a series of working papers which I edited under the title of ‘Studies in Sexual Politics’. What is the relevance of remembering these things now? A mainstream corporate academic publishing empire is still with us and is more rapacious than it was back then. Its dominates the forms that academic publishing takes, in journals and monographs and textbooks, and also it gobbles up anything else researchers might do. There is no high profile pro-active feminist, black, socialist or gay publishing that stands between us and ‘the empire’ anymore, alas. But, there is a larger reading public existing across a whole variety of platforms than ever before. And, there are technologies available that can help prevent energies being siphoned off into the distribution side of things. And, these technologies mean we can do our own thing and not be led by a publisher interested primarily in profit. And, there are still things that can best be said in forms that are not books or articles or chapters, and which have many of the attributes of old-style essays or working papers because they have an open-ended and provisional ‘for now’ character. To read more and view a full list of ‘Studies in Sexual Politics’ back issues, please visit the blog: https://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/go-for-it/
From the Blog: More Elias on Mozart
An earlier blog post ended by asking the question, So what was Elias doing in the different sections of his book on Mozart, those which reference letters by Mozart and those that do not. Where exactly do the letters ces referenappear, and whose letters they are, whether Mozart by himself or some of the member of his family or circle. To read more, please visit the blog: https://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/more-elias-on-mozart/
From the Blog: Epistolary biography and the letters of Mozart
An ‘epistolary biography’ seems simple enough, a biography or account of a life told through the medium of a person’s letters. But immediately some questions arise, which are explored in this blog. By thinking about this in relation to Mozart and the sociological investigation of Mozart’s life by Norbert Elias. To read more, please go to: https://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/epistolary-biography-mozart-letters/
From the Blog: The importance of context
Discussion Concerns two paintings by the Dutch painter Gabriel Metsu which feature letters. In addition to the many symbolic references, what is being conveyed to the viewer in these is that the letter-writing and the letter-reading are personal, or rather inter-personal, matters and not public ones. It is a man writing to someone, and a woman reading what someone has written, two people in a relational engagement facilitated by the medium of epistolarity. The writing man is immersed and concentrated on his missive. The reading woman is both immersed and also aware of potential intrusions and shields herself and her reading from them. To read more, please visit: https://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/the-importance-of-context/
From the Blog: Randlord bearing gifts
Thinking about this week’s blog and what to write, some idle google searching turned up two 17th century Dutch paintings that feature a letter used in a symbolic way. They had earlier been owned and donated to the Gallery by Alfred Beit and his wife. But which Alfred Beit, for there has been a number of them. Alfred Beit the first was the one who made the family wealth. He was one of the so-called ‘Randlords’, the men who became fabulously wealthy through their role in the discovery, commercialisation, and financial wheeling and dealing that occurred around the exploitation, of diamonds and then gold in late 19th century South Africa. To read more, please visit the blog: https://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/randlord-bearing-gifts/
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2. Life Writing and Celebrity: Exploring Intersections–Life Writing, Volume 16, Issue 2, June 2019 is now available.
Life Writing, Volume 16, Issue 2, June 2019 is now available online on Taylor & Francis Online.
Life Writing and Celebrity: Exploring Intersections
This new issue contains the following articles:
Introduction
Life Writing and Celebrity: Exploring Intersections
Sandra Mayer & Julia Novak
Pages: 149-155 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2019.1539208
Articles
An Austrian Auden: A Media Construction Story
Timo Frühwirth
Pages: 159-175 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2019.1540247
Sergei Eisenstein as Seen by Peter Greenaway: A Dialectic Representation of an (Anti-)Great Film Director
Fátima Chinita
Pages: 177-193 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2019.1548251
Fictionalisation in Biography: Creating the Dickens Myth
Rosemary Kay
Pages: 195-212 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2019.1548262
Visual Art as Celebrity Memoir: The Paradox of Peg Woffington’s Sick-bed Portrait
Annette Rubery
Pages: 213-230 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2019.1548253
Writing Celebrity as Disability: Las Meninas, Performing Dwarfs, and Michael Jackson Fan Day
Eva Sage Gordon
Pages: 231-244 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2019.1548261
‘Boswellized From Mere Persons to Personages’: Arthur Stringer, Mary Pickford, and the Trouble with Celebrity Profile(r)s
Katja Lee
Pages: 245-259 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2019.1548264
‘Watergate-ing’ Norman Mailer’s Marilyn: Life Writing in Cultural Context
Oline Eaton
Pages: 261-277 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2019.1548260
Pacts, Paratext, and Polyphony: Writing the Authorised Biography of Robert Wyatt
Marcus O’Dair
Pages: 279-294 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2019.1548265
Reviews
Writing Feminist Lives: The Biographical Battles Over Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, Gloria Steinem, and Simone de Beauvoir
Ina C. Seethaler
Pages: 297-300 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2018.1440877
Dylan’s Autobiography of a Vocation: A Reading of the Lyrics 1965-1967
Muireann Leech
Pages: 301-304 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2018.1512032
In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein
Omar Sabbagh
Pages: 305-308 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2018.1510816
International Auto/Biography Association Worldwide
https://sites.google.com/ualberta.ca/iaba/home
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3. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies33.3 Autumn 2018Special Issue: Lives Outside the Lines: Gender and Genre NOW AVAILABLE
a/b: Auto/Biography Studies
33.3 Autumn 2018
Special Issue: Lives Outside the Lines: Gender and Genre
Guest Editors: Eva C. Karpinski and Ricia Anne Chansky
Foreword
The 2018 Hogan Prize
Eleanor Ty, Wilfrid Laurier University
Introduction
“Finding Fragments: Intersections of Gender and Genre in Life Narratives”
Eva C. Karpinski, York University, and Ricia Anne Chansky, University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez
Reflection
“Cultivating Gullibility” Marlene Kadar, York University
“The Urgency of Writing a Life: An Interview” Sidonie Smith, University of Michigan and Marlen Kadar
Forum
The Work of Marlene Kadar
“Mar and Me: Following the Traces” Linda Warley, University of Waterloo
“Marlene Kadar’s Life Writing: Feminist Theory Outside the Lines” Julie Rak, University of Alberta
“Revising What’s Past: Compassion in the Work of Marlene Kadar and Louise DeSalvo” Julia Galbus, University of Southern Indiana
“Escape from the Colonial Asylum” Patrick Taylor, York University
“Inside the Cover, Outside the Archive: Reading the Dispersal of Jane Rule’s Library and Modes of Female Sociability” Linda Morra, Bishop’s University
“Maternal Stars of the Silent Screen: Gender, Genre, and Photoplay Magazine” Elizabeth Podnieks, Ryerson University
“Unlikely Documents, Unexpected Places: The Limits of Archive” Mark Celinscak, University of Omaha
“Frayed Edges: Selfies, Auschwitz, and a Blushing Emoticon” Rachel E. Dubrofsky, University of South Florida
“Kim Thuy’s Ru and the Art of the Anecdote” Helen Buss, University of Calgary Emerita
“Drawing a Narrative Landscape with Women Refugees” Ozlem Ezer, University of California Berkeley
Essays
“Autobiogeography and Translanguaging: Decolonizing Immigrant Life Stories through Visual Narrative Practices” Manoela dos Anjos Afonso Rodrigues, Universidade Federal de Goiás
In this article I present a research that explores individual and collective autobiographical acts aiming at the creation of places of enunciation for decolonial selves through practices in visual arts. This practice-based research benefits from interdisciplinary crossings between feminist geography, life writing, and decoloniality, through which I designed the network of concepts that gave form to the epistemological approach to practice and research I used. The first stage of the practice is a self-reflective response to personal experiences within geographical displacement and dislocation in language. The second part comprises collective writing processes conducted with twelve Brazilian women who live in London. Writing became a cross-element in this practice-based research and visual arts offered a space for exploring decolonial acts and turning a place of muteness into a place of enunciation. Thus, I sought in decoloniality a path to offer a contribution to knowledge by proposing decolonial strategies for writing life narratives within displacement through translanguaging and autobiogeography.
“Autotheory as Contemporary Feminist Practice Across Media” Lauren Fournier, York University
In autotheory as a feminist practice, artists, writers, philosophers, curators, and critics use the autobiographical, first person, and related practices of self-imaging (Jones, Self/Image 134) to process, perform, enact, iterate, subvert, instantiate, and wrestle with the hegemonic discourses of “theory” and philosophy. The term “autotheory” circulates specifically in relation to third wave and fourth wave feminist texts, such as American writer Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts and American filmmaker and art writer Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick even as the act of theorizing from the first person is well-established within the genealogies of feminism; as a post-1960s practice it takes on a particularly conceptual and performative valence. This article serves as a historicization of what we are referring to in the present as “autotheory,” with autotheoretical antecedents having been referred to as “critical memoir,” “theoretical fiction” (Hawkins 263), “life-thinking” (Samatar), and “fiction theory” (Brossard). I turn my attention to “Sick Woman Theory” and “Sad Girl Theory” as twenty-first century examples of auto-theoretical feminist practices that span out across social media. I consider how these post-internet practices of making space for sickness and sadness in autotheoretical ways can be understood in relation to the imperatives of intersectionality and the complications of neoliberalism in the present.
“Remembering and Forgetting: Graphic Lives at the End of the Line” Kathleen Venema, The University of Winnipeg
This essay analyzes four graphic texts, each of which narrates a daughter’s experience of caregiving through a mother’s final years. I argue that each of the four texts – Roz Chast’s 2014 Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant?, Joyce Farmer’s 2010 Special Exits: A Graphic Memoir, Sarah Leavitt’s 2010 Tangles: A Story about Alzheimer’s, My Mother and Me, and Dana Walrath’s 2016 Aliceheimer’s: Alzheimer’s Through the Looking Glass – uniquely deploys comics’ resources to: assert the elderly mother’s significance as a simultaneously physical, cognitive, emotional, and social being; chronicle the aging mother’s increasingly complex health-care needs; track the processes by which the daughter emerges as caregiver; acknowledge the frequently negative emotions that caregiving prompts; and document the critical, and often very generous forgetting by which ugly emotions are refined and re-storied as elegiac compassion.
“Childhood Exile: Memories and Returns” Leonor Arfuch, Universidad de Buenos Aires
In the context of contemporary forced migrations, my paper deals with the problem of political exile. I focus on the experiences of children whose parents had to flee the repression of the Chilean (1973-1989) and Argentinian (1976-1983) dictatorships, and for whom living “outside the lines” was often a matter of life and death. From Verónica Gerber-Bicceci and Laura Alcoba’s autobiographical and auto-fictional novels, to Macarena Aguiló and Virginia Croatto autobiographical and testimonial films, my analysis focuses on recent works that lie “outside the lines” of canonical genres, and in which personal experience interfaces with collective memory and bears important ethical and political impact.
“Women Making Freedom: Rethinking Gender in Intra-Caribbean Migration from a Curaçaoan Perspective” Rose Mary Allen, University of Curaçao
Caribbean studies has very often conceptualized past migration as a largely male worker affair and has neglected women as independent participants and autonomous decision-makers. Understanding gender-specific migration movements and in that sense also recovering the experiences of women in migration, means addressing issues related to the process of data-collection. One can clearly see here how colonialism, race, and class intersect with gender and sexuality. The patriarchal social structure of inequality, that has historically relegated women to an inferior status in society and the consequent disadvantages have impacted the availability of primary historical source material that could help explore the impact of gender on migration. In this paper, I used a feminist scholarly historical data research approach to ‘reinsert’ Curaçaoan women into the historical narratives of migration as this took place in the nineteenth century from Curacao, a Dutch island situated near the coast of Venezuela.
The Process
“Rejecting Objectivity: Reflections of a Black Feminist Researcher Interviewing Black Women” Keila Taylor, University of Washington
How Would You Teach It?
“The Work of Teaching Women’s Auto/Bio Comics” Candida Rifkind, University of Winnipeg
Afterword
The 2018 Timothy Dow Adams Awards
Reviews
Rev. of Canadian Graphic: Picturing Life Narratives Candida Rifkind and Linda Warley (Eds) Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2016. Bethany Mannon, Old Dominion University
Rev. of Women and Genocide: Gendered Experiences of Violence, Survival and Resistance JoAnn DiGeorgio-Lutz and Donna Gosbee, (Eds.) Women’s Press of Canada, 2016. Jill Worrall, Masey University
Rev. of Postcolonial Life Narratives: Testimonial Transactions Gillian Whitlock Oxford University Press, 2015. John McLeod, University of Leeds
International Auto/Biography Association Worldwide
https://sites.google.com/ualberta.ca/iaba/home
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4. Symbolic Interaction Special Issue Call for Papers
Good Morning,
Please find attached the call for papers for a special issue of the international Journal Symbolic Interaction of interest to BSA Theory Group Members. The title of this special issue is ‘Celebrating and Interrogating the Blumerian Legacy’ and the deadline to submit papers is September 30, 2019. See the attached call for more information including the link to use to submit papers for this special issue.
As we mark the 50th Anniversary of the publication of Blumer’s (1969) pivotal work Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method, it is timely to address debates and critical claims central to the status and future of Blumerian interactionism with a special issue of Symbolic Interaction. We envision a mix of papers which both commemorate and critically assess Blumer himself, or Blumerian theory and methodology, as well as substantive papers that add to, or provide a corrective for, Blumerian interactionism.
We look forward to your submissions. Please contact us if you have any further questions about the special issue.
Dr Jacqueline Low & Dr Gary Bowden
Guest Editors
Special Issue Call For Papers Jacqueline Low and Gary Bowden (Eds.)
Celebrating and Interrogating the Blumerian Legacy
Deadline to Submit Papers: September 30, 2019
As we mark the 50th Anniversary of the publication of Blumer’s (1969) pivotal work Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method, it is timely to address debates and critical claims central to the status and future of Blumerian interactionism with a special issue of Symbolic Interaction. We envision a mix of papers which both commemorate and critically assess Blumer himself, or Blumerian theory and methodology, as well as substantive papers that add to, or provide a corrective for, Blumerian interactionism.
Among the debates worthy of reassessment is Prus’ (1996:75) assertion, that Blumer “deserves … to be acknowledged as the single most important social theorist of the twentieth century” and Maines’ (2001) claim that symbolic interactionism is at risk of being subsumed by those who do not acknowledge the perspective while still using its concepts and practices.
Ripe for debate as well is Abbott’s (1997) argument that Blumer’s emphasis on the symbolic, intersubjective side of the Chicago approach led him to underappreciate the importance of time, space and context. Similarly, papers might address the Iowa School (Couch 1986); Stryker’s (1980), and other’s claims that Blumerian interactionism is astructural, or Best’s (2006:5) conclusion that Blumer is a “tragic figure” who excelled at criticism and theory but conducted weak empirical research.
Papers might also address whether Blumer was the progenitor of an active and ongoing scholarly tradition that continues to grow theoretically and methodologically. Is the perspective thriving in some ways? Or has symbolic interactionism been reduced to the formulaic application of a set of standardized theoretical and methodological practices? Do interactionists still suffer from “analytic interruptus,” the failure of research to lead to fully developed concepts and theories (Lofland 1970:42-43)? In particular, we invite papers for this special issue on the following topics:
- Intellectual biographies of Blumer
- Blumer’s impact on symbolic interactionist theory
- Blumer’s contribution to symbolic interactionist methodology
- Sensitizing concepts
- Generic social processes
- “Formal” sociology
- The charge against Blumerian interactionism of astructural bias
- The current status of the Blumerian legacy for sociology as a whole
- The future of Blumerian interactionism
- Substantive research that extends or corrects Blumerian interactionism
- The integrating of other theoretical approaches into the Blumerian tradition
- Other related topics proposed by authors
Please submit all papers through the journal’s online portal: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/si
Cover letters should mention that the submission is intended for the special issue commemorating the anniversary of Blumer’s (1969) book. For more information, contact the special issue editors Jacqueline Low at jlow@unb.ca and Gary Bowden at glb@unb.ca, or the editor-in-chief at Scott.Harris@slu.edu.
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5. Call for Book Proposals for the Real Lives in Global Perspective Series
Call for book proposals for the series, Real Lives in Global Perspective. Published by Routledge, the purpose of this series is to teach key social, economic, political, and cultural developments in world history to first year university students using parallel biographies as a framework. The books will juxtapose figures facing similar situations in different geographical regions, with one book for each century, each containing four pairs of biographies. The authors should be experts in the appropriate time period willing to research a variety of geographic areas.
Deadline: December 15
Contact Info: Rebecca Boone
Lamar University
Contact Email: raboone@lamar.edu
International Auto/Biography Association Worldwide
https://sites.google.com/ualberta.ca/iaba/home
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6. Writing Through… The Australasian Association of Writing Programs’ 24th Annual Conference (4/8/2019; 11/25-27/2019) Sydney, Australia
The Australasian Association of Writing Programs’ 24th Annual Conference
University of Technology Sydney
25-27 November, 2019
Writing Through…
Creative writing never occurs in a vacuum – there are hurdles to negotiate, whether emotional, physical, psychic or temporal. The theme of this year’s AAAWP conference is‘Writing through …’. The ellipses are pointedly loaded, and we hope by November, will be laden and rich with the knowledge and generosity of your own writing space. Whether your ellipses are thoughts unfinished, hesitations, omissions; whether they are moody, angry, joyful or echoing; whether they are about prejudice, paternalism, or pain, we want to hear how you get through them; how (and why) you write through…
The location of the 2019 annual conference of the AAWP is at the University of Technology Sydney, situated in a lively creative quarter of the city, growing and developing yearly. This year we hope to bring you well-known keynote speakers from the precinct as well as a specialist panel together with an evening event, held at UTS.
We invite presentations — from pedagogy, research, and practice in creative or professional writing, editing and publishing — that interrogate the numerous ways you write through … and the various pathways your work is disseminated, enabling voices (both marginal and mainstream), perspectives, and notions to emerge, form, and animate. Presentation themes may be drawn from (but are not limited to) the following:
- Experiments
- Limitations
- Subjectivities
- Exegetical obstructions, both real and imagined
- Indigenous concepts and experience
- Minority writing (disability, LGBTIQ, refugee…)
- Regional writing
- Performative writing
- Writing together, both creative and scholarly
- Uncertainty (creative, scholarly, employment)
- Professional and industrial parameters
- Austerity
- The ‘class ceiling’
- Orthodoxies
Proposals for individual papers or pre-formed panels (three panellists only) are both welcome. Proposals may be a work of scholarship on or about creative practice, or one engaging with the conference theme in any way, or may be a creative work which incorporates a scholarly framework to be presented along with the creative element. Individual papers will be 15 minutes long, allowing for 15 minutes of questions within the hour; panels are the same time format. Proposed papers will not be subject to peer review but there will be discussion of publication points after the conference. Postgraduates are particularly encouraged to submit to the conference and a postgrad masterclass will be held on the morning after the conference (28 November)—more information soon.
Proposals, both individual papers and pre-formed panels, should be submitted here: https://www.uts.edu.au/about/faculty-arts-and-social-sciences/events/24th-aawp-annual-conference-2019, both by April 8, 2019.
Queries to: aawp2019@uts.edu.au
Conference Committee: Dr Sue Joseph; Dr Sarah Attfield; Professor Craig Batty; Professor John Dale; Mr Michael Stranges
International Auto/Biography Association Worldwide
https://sites.google.com/ualberta.ca/iaba/home
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7. Psychosis of Whiteness: Screenings in London
A film by Eugene Nulman and Kehinde Andrews.
April 11th and 13th 7pm Bernie Grants Arts Centre, London www.berniegrantcentre.co.uk/see/film-the-psychosis-of-whiteness/
The Psychosis of Whiteness sheds light on society’s perceptions of race and racism by exploring cinematic representations of the slave trade. This documentary takes an in-depth look at big budget films that focus on the transatlantic slave trade and, using a wealth of sources and interviews, it argues that these depictions are metaphoric hallucinations about race. Rather than blaming the powerful institutions that are responsible for slavery, these films rewrite history by praising those same institutions for abolishing the slave trade.
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Last updated: 29 March 2019
