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 

Reviewed by Karen Jolly