Center for Biographical Research

We are pleased to announce the publication of Biography 46.4. Find it on Project Muse: https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/54730.

Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly

vol. 46, no. 4, 2023

Table of Contents

Editor’s Note

Reimagining the Past, Present, and Future: History, Temporality, and Life Writing

Reimagining the Past, Present, and Future: History, Temporality, and Life Writing

Maarit Leskelä-Kärki, Kimi Kärki, and Kirsi Tuohela

This cluster, comprising an introduction and six essays, seeks to integrate the disciplines of life writing and history, building on discussions from the 2022 IABA World Conference, “Life-Writing: Imagining the Past, Present, and Future.” Temporality has emerged as a critical dimension for analyzing narratives of lives, and serves as a central theme of this cluster, explored through diverse methodologies, including historians’ attentiveness to the past and archival practices, as well as literary, narrative, and other critical analyses. The cluster aims to illuminate the multifaceted and intellectually intricate nature of temporality, addressing perspectives that range from the global to personal and familial histories, from narratives of climate change to those of trauma. It also emphasizes the role of imagination and creativity in shaping and reinterpreting our understanding of the past.

Stories of a Life: Backward, Forward, or Sideward?

Jens Brockmeier

The wider theoretical and empirical context of this study is the temporal multilayeredness of our narrative constructions of life and identity, both in fictional and nonfictional genres of life writing. Using examples and illustrations from autobiographical memory, fiction, photography, and everyday phenomenology, this essay argues that narrative—in Western traditions of identity formation—plays a crucial role in juggling the many balls of time and identity.

Biofiction’s Melancholic Agency: Deep Time and the Return of History in the Works of Amin Maalouf and Colum McCann

Laura Cernat  

Aiming to nuance Paul Ricoeur’s theories about temporality and identity in fiction and historiography, this article explores biofiction through the prism of Fernand Braudel and Wai Chee Dimock’s notion of deep time. Building on case studies by Amin Maalouf and Colum McCann, I coin the notions of “deep-historical biofiction” and “biofictional histoire croisée” to draw attention to these contemporary writers’ awareness of history’s impact on individual destinies in a world of interdependent developments, which resists human agency while also inviting it to persist. Here I introduce the idea of melancholic agency. Inspired by Ian Baucom’s concept of “melancholy realism” from Specters of the Atlantic and its application by Debjani Ganguly to the contemporary world novel, melancholic agency in biofiction entails preserving the emphasis placed by Michael Lackey on human agency as a distinctive attribute of the genre, while acknowledging that, especially in novels concerned with deep time, this agency often resides only in the power to bear witness, or to imaginatively restore lost truths. This suggests that the gap between the biographical and the historical novel is narrower than previously theorized in biofiction scholarship.

Embedded and Retrieved: A Full Circle of Life, Birth, and Death within Forty-Two Square Meters

Selma Ćatović Hughes

This work aims to engage visual storytelling to reveal the tangible and elusive layers of personal and collective memory. A forty-two-square-meter apartment in Sarajevo purchased by a newlywed couple in 1972 would go on to witness the birth of two children, the early loss of two parents, and life under the siege. A series of original drawings, overlaid with information retrieved from the past (photos, artifacts, and letters), begins to reveal recollections embedded in the space across four decades: the chants of a grandmother’s blessings for the empty new space; the happiness and liveliness of children filling the home with life; the sudden loss of a parent and the basic struggle for survival during the war; the reconstruction of lives in post-conflict society; and finally, another loss of life, and with that, the loss of home. Simultaneously recalling the past and projecting the transformation of the future sequence of events, “Embedded and Retrieved” weaves immaterial connections between life episodes, their impact on spatial modification, and the metamorphosis of the place forever called home.

Picturing a Cubist View of Time (and Space) in Autobiographical Comics

Nancy Pedri

This essay addresses how space and time in autobiographical comics are productively understood in relation to characters and their minds. Distancing itself from approaches that see the relation between time and space as a feature of the formal language of comics, it examines time and space across verbal-visual narrative strategies that deconstruct the bodies of characters or dissolve the spaces they occupy. Through several examples of what can be called, following comics creator Michael DeForge, a cubist view of time, “Picturing a Cubist View of Time (and Space) in Autobiographical Comics” traces how autobiographical comics create temporal and spatial overlaps and indistinctions that can communicate troubled or wounded mental states.

Here for 450 Million Years, Going Now: Ocean Timelines, Climate Crisis, and Life Writing

Clare Brant

This article lays out a case for lifewriting scholars to think about numbers as an important constituent of climate crisis writing. Numbers are critical to how we describe time, plummeting numbers of species, and accelerating rates of extinction. Numbers are also critical to how we establish scales. I discuss infographics as a lifewriting genre that combines biography and numbers, a genre that lends temporary stability to otherwise unimaginable scenarios. Various iterations of numbers in timekeeping devices such as clocks and time bombs provide ways of imaging time and contribute to the power of numerical narratives to tell life stories. So too does biologging, a biographical genre. Studies of future oceans modelled through currently nearly dead, time capsule seas project futures through numbers. The life history and short future of sharks frames my analysis of the power of numbers in life writing.

A Short History of Being Wrong

Sirpa Kähkönen

Sirpa Kähkönen discusses political polarization and political violence during the Finnish Civil War in 1918 and again in 1930. She contextualizes the topic to her own family history, and tells about her explorations with her grandfather’s private archives, as well as her extensive work in the official police and prison archives, and how she came to write both fiction and nonfiction based on this archival work. The microhistorical concept of immaterial inheritance has been the main source of inspiration for Kähkönen, and she has also been deeply involved in questions of psychohistory, epigenetics, and the transgenerational effects of wars and other humanitarian crises.

Open-Forum Articles

Expertise and the Technological Object: Narrating Lived Experience of Deafness, Hearing Aids, and Cochlear Implants in Online Forums

Jessica Kirkness and Nicole Matthews

This article discusses the relationship between technological objects—specifically hearing devices such as hearing aids and cochlear implants—and the stories told about them on hearing-related blogs and online forums. We focus on accounts of lived experience written by deaf and hard of hearing people, and the ways they navigate competing narratives around expertise in relation to these objects. We discuss how these online “flash autobiographies” draw from available scripts around deafness, simultaneously challenging the hierarchy of expertise in hearing health and highlighting the binary between medical and social model accounts of disability. We focus on the ways that self-formation is mediated in these stories, with many testimonies emphasizing mastery through medico-technical discourses and numerical subjectivities. Drawing on the narratives in these public forums, we sketch the diverse relationships between expertise and the intimate object of the hearing device.

The Centenary of the “Polish Method”: The Rise, Fall, and Revival of Memoir Competitions in Poland

Agata Zysiak

The first memoir competition in Poland took place one hundred years ago. This landmark method of Polish sociology began in the interwar period, experienced a later state-socialist boom, and then Poland’s impressive collection of memoirs was largely forgotten and almost destroyed in the 1990s. In this essay, I examine the development of memoir competitions in Poland and discussions around them as a method, giving particular attention to the political agenda of memoir studies during the People’s Republic of Poland. In the context of recognizing working-class and peasant people as social actors and political subjects, I defend postwar memoir competitions as a reliable and valuable means of arguing against the idea that memoirs were merely political tools to legitimize the socialist state. Ultimately, the memoir competitions play a crucial role in revisionist interpretations of the postwar history of Poland, state socialism, and to a certain degree, the entire socialist world.

Review Essay

Questions of Degree: Autofiction on Spectrums from Individual to Collective and from Fiction to Reality

Alexandra Effe

This review essay shows how Hywel Dix’s Autofiction and Cultural Memory (Routledge, 2023) and Fiona J. Doloughan’s Radical Realism, Autofictional Narratives and the Reinvention of the Novel (Anthem Press, 2023) partake in three recent developments in autofiction studies: the exploration of the global reach of autofictional practice, the foregrounding of autofiction’s often ethical orientation, and the need to consider production and reception in approaching a phenomenon difficult to pin down to textual elements alone. Taking inspiration from Dix’s and Doloughan’s studies, the essay develops a theoretical argument for considering autofictional texts as always straddling a spectrum of individual and collective elements, and as always being grounded in reality as well as being fictionally transformed.

Reviews

Nonhuman Witnessing: War, Data, and Ecology After the End of the World, by Michael Richardson

Reviewed by Gillian Whitlock

The Divided States: Unraveling National Identities in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Laura J. Beard and Ricia Anne Chansky

Reviewed by Sergio da Silva Barcellos

Living in Words: Literature, Autobiographical Language, and the Composition of Selfhood, by Garry L. Hagberg

Reviewed by Sarah Allen

Story Revolutions: Collective Narratives from the Enlightenment to the Digital Age, by Helga Lenart-Cheng

Reviewed by Laurie McNeill

A History of African American Autobiography, edited by Joycelyn K. Moody

Reviewed by Nadine M. Knight

The Disabled Child: Memoirs of a Normal Future, by Amanda Apgar

Reviewed by G. Thomas Couser

I Lived to Tell the World: Stories from Survivors of Holocaust, Genocide, and the Atrocities of War, by Elizabeth Mehren

Reviewed by Roger Porter

The Center for Biographical Research invites you to our Brown Bag Biography series for Spring 2025!

Join us at Kuykendall 410 on Thursdays from 12:00-1:15pm! All are welcome!

January 28: “Unsettlement and Mana Unuhi: Kaona, Refusal, and Disappearing Hawaiians”

Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada, Assistant Professor of Moʻolelo ʻŌiwi, Kamakakūokalani Center for Hawaiian Studies

Time: 3:00-4:30PM HST 

February 6: “Ordinary Life Narratives and the Climate Crisis in Contemporary Literature”

Adina Balint, Professor of French Literature, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, University of Winnipeg 

February 13: “Genealogies of Accountability”

Cameron Rasmussen, Assistant Professor, Thompson School of Social Work and Public Health

February 20: “Graphic Energy: Comics, Ecology, and the Politics of Extraction”

Jeffrey Mather, Associate Professor in English, City University of Hong Kong 

February 27: Indigenous Women: Strength, Resilience, and Inspiration

Patricia Cutright, Lakota author, Dean of Libraries Emerita, Retired, Central Washington University

March 6: “My 9th Birthday— a native Palestinian story of beauty and struggle”

Ma’an Odah, Hawaiʻi for Palestine and Community Organizer

March 13: “Religion and Revolution: Aurobindo Ghose and Indian Independence”

Keya Ganguly, Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota

Time: 12:00-1:15PM HST 

March 13: “White Magic & Other Wonders: A Reading & Book Talk”

Elissa Washuta, Professor

Time: 3:00-4:30PM HST

March 27: “Life Narrative at the Terminus: Glacier Memoirs and Planetary Relationality”

John Zuern, Department of English and Co-editor for the Center for Biographical Research, University of Hawaiʻi, Mānoa 

April 3: “Retrospective on Mark Takai’s Legacy”

Jenny Duhaylonsod Delos Santos, Author and Former Journalist 

April 10: “All of Us or None: Movement-Building Migrant Stories to Confront Settler Carcerality”

Monisha Das Gupta, Professor in the Departments of Ethnic Studies and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, University of Hawaiʻi, Mānoa 

April 17: “Letters: Living Archives of Everyday Politics”

Dr. Pallavi Gupta, Faculty, Department of Geography, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa 

April 24: “The Mahele of Our Bodies: Nā Moʻolelo Māhū/LGBTQ Kupuna”

Nohelani Teves, Associate Professor & Chair, Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

We are pleased to announce the publication of Biography 46.3. Find it on Project Muse: https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/53164.

Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly

vol. 46, no. 3, 2023

Table of Contents

Editor’s Note

Open-Forum Articles

Memoir, Utopia, and Belonging in the Postcolony: Akash Kapur’s Better to Have Gone

Hedley Twidle

In Better to Have Gone (2021), the nonfiction writer Akash Kapur weaves together memoir and a history of Auroville, an intentional community or “living laboratory” in Tamil Nadu, southern India. My essay considers how this family biography grapples with what the historian Jessica Namakkal calls “the paradox of a postcolonial utopia,” as Kapur’s personal quest to understand the deaths of two founding members of Auroville widens into a reflection on twentieth-century utopianism and its discontents. At the heart of the work, I suggest, lies the challenge of a secular response to spiritually motivated lives: how can a biographer take seriously the experiences of those whose beliefs he does not share (or might find objectionable, even laughable)?

Disability as Intersectional Identity: Some Reflections on Indian Disabled Life Narratives

P. Boopathi

Despite being few in number, the life narratives of disabled people from India elucidate the ordeals faced by the disabled due to social indifference, traditional family values, ableism, lack of legal protection, and the shame and monstrosity associated with disability in India. This essay explores three disabled life narratives—Naseema, The Incredible Story (2005) by Naseema Hurzuk, The Other Senses (2012) by Preeti Monga, and Lights Out: A True Story of a Man’s Descent into Blindness (2014) by L. Subramani— to demonstrate how the intersectionality of caste, class, and gender constitutes the disabled subject in the Indian context, and how the authors surmount the social and attitudinal barriers posed by family and society to lead a dignified life. For all three writers, their caste and class offer leverage for coping with their acquired disability and for empowerment through economic and technological means. The issues of motherhood and gender, however, emerge as significant obstacles to their progress, and further worsen their social conditions.

The Me in the Poster: Mirrors, Photographs, and “Crip Double Consciousness” in Connie Panzarino’s Memoir

Craig Rustici

This essay elaborates the concept “crip double consciousness” to assess how Connie Panzarino’s experience as a poster child impacted her memoir The Me in the Mirror and her career as a disability activist. The memoir presents multiple mirror episodes that mark stages in Panzarino’s narrative of emancipation. It also recounts how Panzarino deploys photographs of herself, another source of reflected images, to press for access and necessary accommodations. Most significantly, an incident at the Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA) telethon mirrors—that is, reflects with reversals—the moment that gives the memoir its title when a four-year-old Panzarino imagines that her mirror reflection is “another ‘Connie’” free of physical impairments. The conscious doubling of selves Panzarino experiences at the MDA telethon shapes how she reconstructs her earlier, foundational encounter with mirrored selves. 

Dream House as Queer Testimony: Ephemera as Evidence in Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House

Chloe R. Green

In this article, I examine how formal experimentation shapes the act of witnessing in Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir In the Dream House. By analyzing Machado’s autobiographical depictions of queer domestic abuse, which are refracted through a panoply of genres and forms, I argue that her memoir challenges the belief that testimonial narrative must be formally conventional to be believed. I propose that Machado’s formal experimentation and generic instability encourage a mode of reading that is embodied, affective, and crucially queer as a way to address the structural inequities that govern whose testimonies are believed and why. As In the Dream House queers the testimonial form, both in its privileging of ephemeral evidence and its interpolation of the reader’s agency, I argue that it creates a literary metric through which queer subjects can create their own modes of justice.

Brother Outsider: Memoir and the Strategies of the Awkward Black

Tyrone R. Simpson II

Using cultural theory, particularly theories of affect, this essay analyzes Ta-Nehisi Coates’s memoir A Beautiful Struggle (2009) to highlight awkwardness as a trope that recent Black autobiographers deploy to underscore their racial interstitiality and to negotiate their fluctuating identification with blackness—a racial condition that by dint of Civil Rights reform entails both social privileges and persecutions. I show that the use of this trope seeks to produce a new racial category altogether.

Recovering Memories of Holocaust Displacement and Survival in Contemporary (Auto)biographical Comics: On the Collaborative Volume But I Live

Dana Mihăilescu

The comics medium is recognized today as a highly effective way to represent Holocaust experience and memory, and their challenges for new generations, as established in important studies by Hillary Chute, Victoria Aarons, Ole Frahm et al., and Matt Reingold. Continuing in these scholars’ footsteps, I will explore a new direction of Holocaust representation in (auto)biographical graphic narratives over the past few years: that of addressing not just the traumatic aspects of the Holocaust but also the importance of acts of solidarity as resistance during and after World War II in ensuring survival and (self-)care. I will assess this aspect of representation in But I Live, a volume edited by Charlotte Schallié comprising three graphic narratives of child survivors from Romania and the Netherlands, the products of collaboration with well-known graphic artists from North America (Miriam Libicki), Israel (Gilad Seliktar), and Germany (Barbara Yelin)

Collective Biography and Micro-periodization: A Data-Rich Analysis of Recent Lives in the Dictionary of National Biography (1885–1901)

Helen Kingstone

Collective biography contributes to processes of periodization. The article examines how Victorians periodized their own era, through a corpus linguistic analysis of the Dictionary of National Biography (1885–1901). This apparently monumental British imperial project was disproportionately populated by very recent lives, which threatened the demarcation of past from present. Corpus stylistic analysis is used to identify trends among the 8,000 DNB entries on people who had died since 1850, and concepts from memory studies show how DNB contributors transitioned those lives from informal “communicative” memory into monumental “cultural” memory. Contributors sometimes presented themselves as contemporaries of the recent lives they represented, and sometimes as generationally distinct. The article focuses on four evaluative terms they deployed: “modern,” “will always,” “permanent value,” and “generation,” which contributors used as a form of micro-periodization to demarcate their subjects’ achievements and values from their own. “Micro-periodization” may artificially enable biographers to claim the measure of hindsight necessary to narrate recent lives.

Reviews

The Routledge Introduction to Auto/biography in Canada, by Sonja Boon, Laurie McNeill, Julie Rak, and Candida Rifkind

Reviewed by Manuela Costantino

Authorizing Early Modern European Women: From Biography to Biofiction, edited by James Fitzmaurice, Naomi J. Miller, and Sara Jayne Steen

Reviewed by Julia Novak

As Told by Herself: Women’s Childhood Autobiography, 1845–1969, by Lorna Martens

Reviewed by Emma Maguire

Women’s Life Writing in Post-Communist Romania: Reclaiming Privacy and Agency, by Simona Mitroiu

Reviewed by Oana Popescu-Sandu

Feminists Reclaim Mentorship: An Anthology, edited by Nancy K. Miller and Tahneer Oksman

Reviewed by Elizabeth Colwill

Memoirs of Race, Color, and Belonging, by Nicole Stamant

Reviewed by Francesca T. Royster

Black Travel Writing: Contemporary Narratives of Travel to Africa by African American and Black British Authors, by Isabel Kalous

Reviewed by Erica L. Williams

Building that Bright Future: Soviet Karelia in the Life Writing of Finnish North Americans, by Samira Saramo

Reviewed by Sara Maaria Saastamoinen

Beyond the Icon: Asian American Graphic Narratives, edited by Eleanor Ty

Reviewed by Calvin McMillin

Graphic Public Health: A Comics Anthology and Road Map, by Meredith Li-Vollmer

Reviewed by JoAnn Purcell

We’re excited to announce the schedule for Brown Bag Biography, Fall 2024. 

All of our talks will be held in person in Kuykendall 410 (UH Mānoa). For more information, please visit our website and social media, where we will post detailed announcements for each event. 

BROWN BAG BIOGRAPHY

DISCUSSIONS OF LIFE WRITING BY & FOR TOWN & GOWN

THURSDAYS, 12:00 NOON–1:15 PM HST, unless otherwise noted 

KUYKENDALL 410 (UH MĀNOA)

All are welcome to attend. For more information, please visit the Center for Biographical Research’s website https://manoa.hawaii.edu/cbr/, contact us at 808-956-3774 or gabiog@hawaii.edu, or sign up for our mailing list at https://forms.gle/Sr9WdvNBD9WdwG7EA.

Fall 2024 SCHEDULE

September 12: “Clairboyance: A Reading & Craft Chat”

Kristiana Kahakauwila, Director of the Creative Writing Program, Department of English, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

NB: Time: 3:00 to 4:30 pm HST

September 19: “Puana: A Conversation about the Upcoming Hawaiian-language Play Exploring Music, Kūpuna, and Their Living Legacy”

Moderated by Tammy Haili‘ōpua Baker, Professor, Department of Theatre and Dance, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

Featuring panelists Maile Speetjens, Kaʻiukapu Baker, Noelani Montas, Chris Patrinos, Antonio Hernandez, and Kelli Finnegan

Will be live streamed

September 26: “This Story is No Longer Available: Working with Experiential Media and Life Narratives”

Amy Carlson, Serials Librarian, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Library

October 3: “Lose your Father(land): A former slave turned Calvinist missionary returns to Elmina, Ghana (1742–47)”

Peter Arnade, Professor of History and Dean of the College of Arts, Languages & Letters, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

October 10: “Ahu‘ena: A Life In and Beyond the Archives”

Noah Hanohano Dolim, Assistant Professor, Department of History, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

October 17 “Imua Me Ka Hopo Ole – Kānaka ‘Ōiwi Survivance and Colonial Education in Territorial Hawai‘i, 1900–1941” 

Derek Taira, PhD, Historian of Education and 20th Century Hawai‘i and US, Department of Educational Administration, College of Education, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, and Affiliate Faculty, Center for Pacific Island Studies and Indigenous Politics Program, Department of Political Science

October 24: “Imagining Life in Honolulu Chinatown circa 1900”

Wing Tek Lum, Honolulu Businessman and Poet

October 31: “The Afterlives of Benjamin Lay, in Biography, Play, Graphic Novel, Children’s Book, and Documentary Film”

Marcus Rediker, Dai Ho Chun Chair in the College of Arts, Languages, & Letters, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

November 7: “[…]: Poems”

Fady Joudah, Poet, Physician, and Translator

NB: Time: 3:00 to 4:30pm HST

November 14: “John Kneubuhl: A Portal to Oceanic Modernism”

Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl, Writer

Jackie Pualani Johnson, Professor Emerita, University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo

November 21: “The Place of Jewish Voice for Peace in Hawaiʻi: An Intergenerational Roundtable”

Moderated by Cynthia G. Franklin, Professor, Department of English, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

Featuring panelists Imani Altemus-Williams, Josie Brody, Beverly Davis, Rose Elovitz, George Hudes, and Julie Warech

The Center for Biographical Research is pleased to announce the latest issue of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, available on Project Muse!

Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly
volume 46, number 2

Editor’s Note

Open-Forum Articles

Exvangelical (De)conversion Narratives and the Religious Politics of Spiritual Autobiography

Matthew Mullins

Scholars and pundits have devoted significant attention to the rise of the religiously unaffiliated in the United States in recent years. Within that demographic there are many former evangelical Christians who remain Christian but are no longer evangelical or have abandoned Christianity altogether. Many of these former evangelical Christians identify as exvangelicals. This essay analyzes autobiographies written by exvangelicals, and argues that their narratives of deconversion can best be understood in the generic tradition of the conversion narrative. When situated in this generic context, these exvangelical autobiographies testify to a crisis in twenty-first-century religious politics that mirrors similar tensions in the past and suggests the US is in a period of civic transition.

Psychoanalytic Readings of the Soul: The Birth of Psychography and the New Strategies of Psycholiterary Portraiture

Agnieszka Sobolewska

As a simultaneously psychoanalytic, literary, and lifewriting genre, psychography has not yet been the subject of any systematic reflection. As a genre that sprouted out of nineteenth-century pathography, psychography prepared the ground for the development of innovative strategies for writing lives. The author introduces a genealogy of this hybrid writing genre that found itself at the core of early psychoanalytic literature, and points to its interconnections with life writing and literary modernism.

“With Its Shadows Dominating the Brightness”: Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother and the Subjects of AIDS History

Jacob E. Aplaca

This essay reads Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother (1997), a memoir that recounts her brother Devon’s AIDS-related death, in relation to both the corpus of US AIDS life writing that emerged during the so-called height of the AIDS crisis and today’s ongoing practices of AIDS commemoration. Challenging the activist-centered knowledge paradigms through which the subjects of AIDS memoir largely continue to be understood, My Brother lays bare the conditions that sustain the celebratory legacy of US AIDS activism and its exemplary gay white male subject—an understanding of AIDS that brackets off what Jih-Fei Cheng, Alexandra Juhasz, and Nishant Shahani have described as the uneven distribution of AIDS crises across the world. At the same time, this essay considers the risks that attend contemporary efforts to bring into greater relief these global crises by assuming the transparency of Devon, and those similarly situated, as objects of our knowledge.

Between Genre and Medium: Hilda Tablet, Henry Reed’s Fictional Metabiography for Radio

Birgit Van Puymbroeck

In the 1950s, Henry Reed wrote the seven-part series Hilda Tablet, a humorous radio play for the Third Programme, the BBC’s cultural channel. The series deals with the fictional biographer Herbert Reeve—Henry Reed’s alter ego—who writes a biography of the also fictional author Richard Shewin and later the composer Hilda Tablet. This article analyzes Hilda Tablet in the light of biography studies. It argues that the series “remediates” the genre of biography on radio, and uses techniques associated with fictional metabiography and mockbiography to highlight, question, and satirize genre and media conventions. Through a contextual and audionarratological analysis, it recovers Hilda Tablet for critical analysis, and reflects on the use of audio techniques for biographical construction and interpretation. It contributes to the study of biography in two ways: by focusing on the little-explored hybrid genre of the radio biography, and by paying close attention to aspects of the fictional metabiography and mockbiography.

“Beyond the Front, Specificity Is Abandoned”: Illustrating Backgrounds in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home

Olivia Abram

This essay examines setting and its illustration in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic as autobiographically representative of its author. This approach inverts the conventional prioritization of subject and foreground as illustrative of the author/self, and instead focuses on the surroundings in which (and on which) they draw themselves.

The Testimonial Imperative, Collective Autobiography, and Individual Stories of #MeToo on Twitter

Leah Anderst

This essay looks closely at testimonials posted to Twitter as part of the viral #MeToo movement in October 2017. It examines a testimonial imperative at work in the movement, a driving need and a feeling of responsibility for survivors to come forward and join others who are speaking to share, to bear witness, and to listen to each other. The #MeToo movement has been described as a collective autobiography, but what we also see when we read #MeToo testimonial tweets is that many survivors posted, replied, and quote-tweeted in ways that highlight their individual experiences and their individual selves. By reading closely a number of tweets, this essay unearths important themes, strategies, and forged connections that emerged within this online autobiographical movement.

Biobibliographical Studies of Georgian Writers

Maia Ninidze, Saba Metreveli, and Tea Tvalavadze

Most of the sources on which biographies rely are textual. Therefore, the Biobibliographies of Georgian authors became more complete and reliable after greater attention began to be directed toward textual investigations. This article describes the methods and approaches that we and our colleagues have been using to create biobibliographies.

Reviews

Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction, edited by Julia Novak and Caitríona Ní Dhúill

Reviewed by Stephanie Russo

Text and Image in Women’s Life Writing: Picturing the Female Self, edited by Valérie Baisnée-Keay, Corinne Bigot, Nicoleta Alexoae-Zagni, Stephanie Genty, and Claire Bazin

Reviewed by Amy Carlson

The Photographer as Autobiographer, by Arnaud Schmitt

Reviewed by Charles Reeve

The Human Rights Graphic Novel: Drawing it Just Right, by Pramod K. Nayar

Reviewed by Martha Kuhlman

New Forms of Self-Narration: Young Women, Life Writing and Human Rights, by Ana Belén Martínez García

Reviewed by Meg Jensen

Transnational Perspectives on Artists’ Lives, edited by Marleen Rensen and Christopher Wiley

Reviewed by Julie Codell

False Summit: Gender in Mountaineering Nonfiction, by Julie Rak

Reviewed by Denisa Krásná

Global Biographies: Lived History as Method, edited by Laura Almagor, Haakon A. Ikonomou, and Gunvor Simonsen

Reviewed by Jeremy D. Popkin

Life Writing in the Posthuman Anthropocene, edited by Ina Batzke, Lea Espinoza Garrido, and Linda M. Hess

Reviewed by Louis van den Hengel

Autobiography, Memory and Nationhood in Anglophone Africa, by David Ekanem Udoinwang and James Tar Tsaaior

Reviewed by Nick Mdika Tembo

Oral Forms of Nigerian Autobiography and Life Stories, by Adetayo Alabi

Reviewed by Nick Mdika Tembo

Dreams of Archives Unfolded: Absence and Caribbean Life Writing, by Jocelyn Fenton Stitt

Reviewed by Julie Rak

Autobiography as Indigenous Intellectual Tradition: Cree and Métis âcimisowina, by Deanna Reder

Reviewed by Rachel Stubbs

Minor Salvage: The Korean War and Korean American Life Writings, by Stephen Hong Sohn

Reviewed by Heui-Yung Park

Negotiating Racial Politics in the Family: Transnational Histories Touched by National Socialism and Apartheid, by Barbara Henkes

Reviewed by Sarah Nuttall

Dead Men Telling Tales: Napoleonic War Veterans and the Military Memoir Industry, 1808–1914, by Matilda Greig

Reviewed by Scott Krawczyk

Material Ambitions: Self-Help and Victorian Literature, by Rebecca Richardson

Reviewed by Issy Brooks-Ward

Speculative Biography: Experiments, Opportunities and Provocations, edited by Donna Lee Brien and Kiera Lindsey

Reviewed by Kylie Cardell

Our Hearts Are Restless: The Art of Spiritual Memoir, by Richard Lischer

Reviewed by Matthew Mullins

Magical Habits, by Monica Huerta

Reviewed by Regina Marie Mills

The Art of Identification: Forensics, Surveillance, Identity, edited by Rex Ferguson, Melissa M. Littlefield, and James Purdon

Reviewed by Sara Collins

The Center for Biographical Research is pleased to announce the winner of the 2024 Biography Prize for outstanding creative, critical, or theoretical work in the field of life writing by University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa graduate students. 

This year, we awarded the prize to Kristin Olsen Santana for “The Waiting Room.” We also recognized Kalilinoe Detwiler’s “Live Again: Rebuilding Intimacy Through Mediation” with an honorable mention. More detailed descriptions of the projects and the judges’ comments appear below. 

“The Waiting Room” by Kristin Olsen Santana

The prize committee found “The Waiting Room” to be at once brave, beautiful, powerful, tender, and tough.

“We appreciated your insights into the loneliness of chronic pain and illness and also into the gendered experiences of what beauty is and what it means to be loveable. We were also impressed by your powerful use of metaphor.”

“Live Again: Rebuilding Intimacy Through Mediation” by Kalilinoe Detwiler

The Prize Committee appreciated how this ambitious multimodal project makes significant contributions to life writing studies.

“We thought you did wonderful work interweaving your grandmother’s story with your own as you provided insights into what it means to tell one’s own and a family member’s story that, from Kanaka Maoli perspective, adds to and sometimes challenges understandings of what it means to write a life. We were especially struck by your explorations of intergenerational memory, cartography, and wahi pana.”

UPDATE: Due to inclement weather on Oʻahu, Part II has been rescheduled from May 16 to June 4.

The King Kamehameha V Judiciary History Center presents, with cosponsorship from the 1898 Project and the Center for Biographical Research:

“Tides of Change: Mapping the Legacy of US Island Imperialism and Community Empowerment”

Tides of Change – Part II

Native Hawaiian Student Services and the Center for Biographical Research present:

The 1898 Project Summit

Saturday, April 13, 1:00–8:00 pm
Sunday April 14, 9:00 am–6:00 pm

Kamakakūokalani Center for Hawaiian Studies, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

The 1898 Project is a two-day summit of leading scholars and activists on American imperialism from Hawaiʻi, Guåhan, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico; the how and why, its effects, and what can be done now and in the future to cope, heal, and decolonize.

Please see here for the full program: https://manoa.hawaii.edu/cbr/the-1898-project/summit-program/

The Center for Biographical Research is now accepting nominations for the 2024 Biography Prize

Criteria for Nomination:

• The candidate should be a PhD or MA student in any graduate department of the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa (or have graduated with an MA or PhD in December 2023).
• The submission can be work written for a class, a section of a thesis or dissertation, or a completed thesis or dissertation. If written for a class, it should be work completed between May 2023 and April 2024 (and not previously submitted for a Biography Prize).

The project should be 3,000 to 10,000 words in length. Longer projects can be submitted in their entirety, with a particular chapter or section highlighted for consideration. The work should demonstrate knowledge or awareness of central debates and theorizing in the field and study of life writing.

Please send nominations (graduate student’s name and subject or title of project) and contact information to Paige Rasmussen (biograph@hawaii.edu) by Tuesday, April 9.

Once you send your nomination, the Center for Biographical Research will notify the student to arrange for submission of the project. Candidates may also nominate their own work for the award. The deadline for submissions is Tuesday, April 16.

The winner of the Biography Prize receives a monetary award and is invited to give a presentation in the Brown Bag Biography lecture series.

Please join the Center for Biographical Research in congratulating Biography coeditor L. Ayu Saraswati! Her book Scarred: A Feminist Journey Through Pain (NYU Press, 2023) won the Autobiography and Biography category of the AAP PROSE Book Award!

You can find the full announcement here: https://publishingperspectives.com/2024/03/the-aaps-prose-awards-2024-category-winners/

For more information on the award-winning book, visit this link: https://nyupress.org/9781479817078/scarred/