The Center for Biographical Research and the Department of English present:
Thursday, August 20, 2026: “Global Indigeneities: A Workshop Panel” and Dinner Reception
Following a special walkthrough of “Emergence: Puka Mai”
Moderated by J. Kēhaulani Kauanui (Kanaka Maoli), Princeton University
Featuring Jerome Jeffrey Clark (Diné), Arizona State University; Kasey Keeler (Tuolumne Me-Wuk & Citizen Potawatomi), University of Wisconsin; Umasankar Patra, Indian Institute of Technology Madras; Sara Maaria Toroi (Karjalaine), University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa; and TheresaWarburton, Western Washington University.
Location: Kuykendall 410
Time: 6:00–7:30 pm HST
What is the substance of indigeneity and significance of Indigenous identities across global geographies and representations of embodied, lived experiences? What makes Indigenous life narrative distinct from other life narratives? What are the cultural contours of claiming indigeneity in relation to land-based cultures? How can life writing studies enable us to contend with (different) understandings of indigeneity? The Workshop Panel and Dinner Reception will follow “Emergence: Puka Mai,” a
solo exhibition featuring the art of Wahineka‘iu Rie Sharon Lum HoCurated by J. Kēhaulani Kauanui
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 47, number 3
Editor’s Note
Best Minds Forum Articles
The Very Best Attention: A Roundtable on Jonathan Rosen’s The Best Minds
Rebecca Wanzo
Fiction in Flight: Rereading Joy Comes in the Morning after The Best Minds
Joshua Lambert
This article offers a comparative reading of Jonathan Rosen’s 2023 biography, The Best Minds, and his 2004 novel Joy Comes in the Morning. Because both books tell substantially similar stories, including their attention to a young man suffering from schizophrenia, the comparison offers an unusual opportunity to explore the affordances and limitations of fiction and nonfiction for telling stories about mental illness and its effects. In the novel, the character’s schizophrenia is presented in terms of its effects on the novel’s other characters. Drawing on close readings and an interview with the author, this article suggests reading The Best Minds as a corrective attempt to tell the previously fictionalized story again, in a way that gives more respect to a person suffering from mental illness and to the victims of his violent acts.
The Epistemological Quagmire of the Intellectual Dead End
Therí Alyce Pickens
This creative nonfiction essay explores how Jonathan Rosen’s The Best Minds makes claims about brilliance and good intentions. Pickens takes the perspective of a skeptical reader, one who sorts through her own relationship to high theory, race, gender, and brilliance while contemplating Rosen’s work.
Best Minds, Entangled: Cultures of Psychiatry, Biographical Dialectics, and Narrative Ethics
Ronja Bodola
The Best Minds is a hybrid text that intertwines cultural biography, autobiography, and the history of psychiatry in the United States. This article argues that Rosen’s narrative is structured through a logic of “entanglement,” capturing the intertwined lives of Jonathan Rosen and Michael Laudor alongside broader sociocultural, political, and psychiatric discourses. The “biographical dialectics” of Jonathan’s and Michael’s lives captures the ongoing, unresolved negotiation of identity in chronic illness. Michael’s life is marked by continuous disruption without narrative closure, contrasting with Jonathan’s retrospective capacity to impose coherence. This asymmetry underscores the narrative power imbalance between subject and narrator, and ultimately raises questions about ethical engagement with, and narrative accountability for stories of mental illness.
A Deadly Convergence: Intergenerational Trauma and Psychosis
Anne L. Glowinski
Jonathan Rosen’s The Best Minds is an autobiographical narrative tracing Rosen’s decades-long perspective on his childhood friend Michael Laudor, a brilliant young man endowed with a “best mind,” who develops severe schizophrenia. His deterioration is portrayed as a tragedy: a gradual, relentless decline culminating in a terrible act of violence. This essay explores how Holocaust trauma persists through ubiquitous safety concerns and hypervigilance among the Ashkenazi Jews who immigrated to the United States from Europe after World War II, as well as among their descendants. It argues that intellectual achievement serves as a stress-reducing safeguard through gained respectability and engrossing purpose, and as a mask concealing existential anxieties. The essay further examines how, within this context of intergenerational trauma and intellectual elitism, the schizophrenia disrupting Michael’s promise of a bright future contributed to a dangerous convergence of severe illness, anxiety, and denial—that led to tragedy.
Open-Forum Articles
The Ordinary Middle: Everyday Black Women and the Depths of the Unspectacular
Rhaisa Kameela Williams
Centering the ordinary lives of poor and working-class Black women in Cleveland, Ohio—a midwestern, deindustrializing city in the midst of rapid decline since the 1940s—I draw on performance studies, Black feminism, and life writing to foreground “resilient weariness” as a crucial affect that frames how they engage each other, local and national policies, and ecological phenomena through the unspectacular and uneventful matter of their lives. In this essay, the ordinary also describes the types of matter that are passed down through mundane rituals. Here, those types of matter are snippets of conversations, memories, and the visual vernacular of a 1976 photograph of my mother, grandmother, and great-aunt at a party. My focus on what I have inherited through conversations and memories are the afterlives of the photograph, occurring in moments that I registered as inconsequential because they were strewn throughout my everyday life. In doing so, I use these experiences to conceptualize the middle as a temporality and positionality that allows me to read archives I have lived amongst, to wade through and tarry in my ordinary worlds that were either unconscious to me or discredited in the academy.
Others in Attendance: Queer Autothanatographical Address in Eric Michaels’s Unbecoming
Sarah A. McDaniel
This essay proposes posthumous address as an essential and understudied parameter of LGBTQ+ life writing. I take up Unbecoming (1987–1988), the diary begun by anthropologist Eric Michaels eleven months before his death due to AIDS-related opportunistic infections, as an exemplar of what I term queer autothanatographical address. Bringing together diverse theoretical approaches to autothanatography (the writing of the death of the author), queer theoretical interrogations of time and temporality, and LGBTQ+ criticism and artwork responsive to the HIV/AIDS crisis, I argue that Michaels models a practice of posthumous address with insurgent political and ethical stakes. This practice, I show, transforms his lifewriting project from a personal diary to an acerbic and interpellative letter.
After You Have the Words: The Burden and Hope of Trans Youth Witnessing
Megan Paslawski
The limitations of testimony are difficult for trans youth to negotiate as they contend with the “hidden adult” of children’s literature. This article seeks a more expansive future for trans youth witnessing by recognizing how the moments of resistance in the memoirs it discusses originate from a BIPOC/feminist/queer tradition of pedagogical autobiography. As these texts by Katie Rain Hill, Skylar Kergil, and Jazz Jennings demonstrate, the trans youth memoir is least limited when it envisions its work as peer-to-peer witnessing, not testifying to an adult audience with the power of necropolitical judgment.
“Berlin Is All in Ruins, and I Don’t Have a Single Scratch on Me. Fate!”: Luck and Fate in the Memoir of a Former Teenage Ostarbeiter
Anastasia Kostetskaya
The article presents a narrative analysis of the motifs of luck and fate as they appear in an autobiographical narrative of forced labor written by a former adolescent Ostarbeiter from Stalingrad.
Reviews
Life-Writing in the History of Archaeology: Critical Perspectives, edited by Clare Lewis and Gabriel Moshenska
Reviewed by Patrick V. Kirch
The #MeToo Effect: What Happens When We Believe Women, by Leigh Gilmore
Reviewed by Christina Nakyong Lee
Hybridity in Life Writing: Combining Text and Images, edited by Arnaud Schmitt
Reviewed by Olga Michael
The Afro-Latino Memoir: Race, Ethnicity and Literary Interculturalism, by Trent Masiki
Reviewed by Jocelyn Fenton Stitt
The Mountain and The Politics of Representation, edited by Martin Hall and Jenny Hall
Reviewed by Anna Saroldi
The Routledge Introduction to American Life Writing, edited by Amy Monticello and Jason Tucker
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 2025).
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 2025 and April 2026 (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 Professor Cynthia Franklin (cfrankli@hawaii.edu) by Tuesday, April 21.
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 28.
The winner of the Biography Prize receives a monetary award and is invited to give a presentation in the Brown Bag Biography lecture series.
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 47, number 2
Editor’s Note
Open-Forum Articles
“Silence will not protect you”: Asserting Body Politics in Contemporary Spanish Autofiction
Patricia López-Gay
Autofiction transposes the postmodern idea that all language is fiction into autobiographical writing. A transgenerational group of socially conscious women writers in Spain has embraced a model of autofiction rooted in the primacy of the social and the materiality of bodies over metaliterary speculation. Marta Sanz, Paula Bonet, and Sara Torres challenge the view of reality as mere text or simulacrum, presenting autofictions that foreground the social responsibility of the author and urge readers to engage with their historical present. Central to their narratives is an acknowledgment of vulnerability as a shared condition, as conceptualized by Judith Butler and Audre Lorde, not only as a site of resistance but also as a means of empowerment. These writers critique neoliberal and patriarchal norms, advocating for social change through heightened awareness and solidarity among women, thereby re-politicizing Spain’s literary scene. By adopting a centrifugal rather than centripetal approach to autofiction, they transition from individual experiences to collective social consciousness, fostering new ethical imaginations.
“The Shared Text of Our Days”: Witnessing and Repair as Rejection of Neoliberal Feminism in Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat
Isobel Lavers
In her 2020 memoir A Ghost in the Throat, Doireann Ní Ghríofa seeks to conjure a maternal community based on witnessing through her unique polyvocal prose. Mingling her own life narrative with the biography of eighteenth-century poet Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, Ní Ghríofa engages in a dialogic narrative process wherein the two women’s shared experiences as Irish mothers and writers allows Ní Ghríofa to form vital community connections between herself and the long-dead poet despite the centuries between them. In this essay, I address the reparative culmination of this community-building process, as Ní Ghríofa’s memoir challenges neoliberal feminist constructions of motherhood.
Present Change for Future Lives: Greta Thunberg’s Climate Activist Life Writing
Ana Belén Martínez García
Over the past decade, the climate movement has emerged as a vital mobilizing collective movement both online and in the streets. Contrary to what some may think, youth refuse to partake of mere hacktivist initiatives and prefer in-person, disrupting actions. Faced with a past of inaction, a present of destruction, and an imperiled future, youth today are actually becoming activists on testimonial grounds. Their identities hinge on a collective awareness-raising agenda as well as the shared consciousness that their lives are at stake. In this context, Greta Thunberg’s activism exemplifies the use of lifewriting methods to exercise agency, to fight for the right to (have) a future. One may thus read her identity being constructed on- and offline as testimonial, in the sense that it is co-constructed and has a collective valence. Her witnessing acts, imbued with emotional undertones, call on audiences/readers to use their collective imagination. Reading her lifewriting practices helps us see how youth today are fighting for their rights, and paving a way forward.
Writing Returns: Unsettling Borders and Resisting Fragmentation in the Work of Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian and Sarah Ihmoud
Ido Fuchs
This article examines Palestinian resistance to Israel’s violent border regime—which aims to dispossess, fragment, and segregate Palestinian communities—through a close reading of Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian and Sarah Ihmoud’s lifewriting essay “Exiled at Home: Writing Return and the Palestinian Home” (2014). It shows how Shalhoub-Kevorkian and Ihmoud’s method of writing stories of return unsettles geographic, kinship, genre, epistemic, and subjective borders, thereby contesting colonial violence and offering alternative modes of belonging in the very form of writing. Situating this argument within the authors’ broader scholarship and activism, and against the backdrop of the recent persecution of Shalhoub-Kevorkian for her academic work, the article concludes that resisting colonial border regimes may also call for challenging the boundaries of academic practice itself.
Hearing the Post-Soviet Soul: The Relational Poetics of Listening in Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets
Bilyana Manolova
This article examines Svetlana Alexievich’s self-portrayal as a listening narrator in Secondhand Time. Drawing on theories of relational subjectivity, I demonstrate how the encounter between listening and narrating subjects in Alexievich’s work frames the post-socialist transition not only as a political and economic crisis, but also as a rupture in interpersonal bonds that destabilizes the very foundations of post-Soviet self-formation. I argue that through her self-narration as a listener, Alexievich invokes the conventions of the Russian soul-baring conversation as a reparative form, reconstructing interpersonal connection between post-socialist subjects. The article thus demonstrates how post-socialist life writing can function as an aesthetic and cultural practice for restoring relationality and self-continuity in the aftermath of socialism’s collapse. This article is based on a chapter from the author’s RMA Thesis “Intimacies in Transition: The Formation of Post-socialist Subjectivity in Life Narratives from Bulgaria, Russia, and Ukraine” conducted at Utrecht University.
The Signature and the Sigil: Fortean Biography, Chaos Magick, and a Metabiographical Approach to Proper Names in Jonathan Downes’s The Owlman and Others
Nicholas K. Mohlmann
Drawing on recent scholarship on metabiography, the article examines how cryptozoologist Jonathan Downes draws on subcultural ideological values to develop strategies to stabilize or destabilize the proper name in biographical discourse. Ultimately, the article argues that through paranormal concepts, Downes enacts a theory of the biographical signature that foregrounds the uncanny dynamics of how biographical texts invest proper names with meaning.
Reviews
Reading the Contemporary Author: Narrative, Authority, Fictionality, edited by Alison Gibbons and Elizabeth King
Reviewed by Hannie Lawlor
All Our Families: Disability Lineage and the Future of Kinship, by Jennifer Natalya Fink
Reviewed by G. Thomas Couser
Racial Dimensions of Life Writing in Education, edited by Lucy E. Bailey and KaaVonia Hinton
Reviewed by Orly Lael Netzer
African Memoirs and Cultural Representations: Narrating Traditions, by Toyin Falola
Reviewed by Nick Mdika Tembo
Before Equiano: A Prehistory of the North American Slave Narrative, by Zachary McLeod Hutchins
Reviewed by Kaushik Tekur
Invisibility and Influence: A Literary History of AfroLatinidades, by Regina Marie Mills
Reviewed by Elisa Rios
Women Vloggers, Cultures & Nature: Narrativising Rural Lifescape, by Alberta Natasia Adji
Reviewed by Ümit Kennedy
Artists and Their Autobiographies from Today to the Renaissance and Back: Symptoms of Sincerity, by Charles Reeve
Reviewed by Alex Belsey
Native Removal Writing: Narratives of Peoplehood, Politics, and Law, by Sabine N. Meyer
Reviewed by Jonathan Radocay
Biography: An Historiography, by Melanie Nolan
Reviewed by Karoliina Sjö
Translating Europe in Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, by Luisa Ostacchini
We’re excited to announce the schedule for Brown Bag Biography, Fall 2025.
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.
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
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
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.
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 production designers 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 HS
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
