This review aims to analyse Magnus Brechtken (Eds.), Life Writing and Political. Memoir- Lebenszeugnisse und Politische Memoiren.For anyone interested in political memoirs the question of their value and influence is intriguing. Of course, few will now believe that politicians' memoirs and autobiographies should be taken as objective stories people can rely on. But how far can we go in indeed believing them? In other words, do politicians in general write the truth about themselves or is any political memoir whatsoever by definition an unreliable piece?
Without seeking to be exhaustive, this paper offers an overview of the different ways in which workers' autobiographies have been analysed in France in the human sciences. In the first phase, a social and political approach was dominant. Through workers' autobiographies written in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, researchers have attempted to grasp the relationship to politics, and especially in the twentieth century the acceptance or rejection of the communist model in the reconstruction of their political and trade union trajectories. At the same time, in a cultural approach, they have tried to understand the educational and literary influences which marked these self-taught workers who, unusually in the workers' world, crossed over from practices of reading to practices of writing. Over the last ten years, workers' autobiographies have become sources particularly used in the framework of labour history and workers' history. Indeed they make it possible to grasp how men and women articulate their working conditions: the atmosphere in the workshop, gestures in work and relations between the body and the work, perception of noises and smells, relationships with hierarchy and trade-unions. These autobiographies can be considered as constituting real "political acts" which contribute to class struggle. Finally, at the intersection of anthropological researches about "ordinary writings" and literary studies about the writing of work and writing at work, they pose a question about the means and the meaning of writing experiences by paying more attention to the form of the writings and to the workers' literary ambitions, which are often revealed in interviews.
Through a comparison of Chinese and Chinese American (auto)biographical accounts, this article facilitates a transpacific literary exchange that tracks cultural persistence and diffusion, offers a transnational perspective on the alleged absence of indigenous Chinese autobiography and the controversial use of fake "Orientalist" material in Chinese American life-writing, and highlights the need for bicultural literacy in grappling with this literature. Contesting Frank Chin's categorical condemnation of autobiography (as a Western Christian contraption laden with self-hatred), I trace its manifestations in transpacific texts and the convergences in those texts: melding of autobiography and biography, salience of maternal legacies, and interdependent self-formation. Unlike the Chinese authors who lavish compliments on their forebears, however, the Chinese American authors do not scruple to disclose unseemly family secrets or to defy the boundaries between history and fiction—practices that some Asian American critics find vexing. I demonstrate that the critical qualms about Chinese American life-writing have to do with the politics of representation and that bicultural literacy can obviate cultural misreading.
Through a comparison of Chinese and Chinese American (auto)biographical accounts, this article facilitates a transpacific literary exchange that tracks cultural persistence and diffusion, offers a transnational perspective on the alleged absence of indigenous Chinese autobiography and the controversial use of fake "Orientalist" material in Chinese American life-writing, and highlights the need for bicultural literacy in grappling with this literature. Contesting Frank Chin's categorical condemnation of autobiography (as a Western Christian contraption laden with self-hatred), I trace its manifestations in transpacific texts and the convergences in those texts: melding of autobiography and biography, salience of maternal legacies, and interdependent self-formation. Unlike the Chinese authors who lavish compliments on their forebears, however, the Chinese American authors do not scruple to disclose unseemly family secrets or to defy the boundaries between history and fiction—practices that some Asian American critics find vexing. I demonstrate that the critical qualms about Chinese American life-writing have to do with the politics of representation and that bicultural literacy can obviate cultural misreading.
In May 2011, the second IABA Europe conference, entitled "Trajectories of(Be)longing: Europe in Life Writing", took place at Tallinn University, Estonia. The conference discussed questions regarding the possibility and productivity of specifically European modes and practices of life writing. Conference sessions focused on spatial mappings and sites of story-telling about Europe in life writing and their temporal dynamics with respectto major historical ruptures and transformations. The lines of inquiry focused, on the one hand, on how the modes and practices of auto/biographical representation were structured around a sense of belonging toor longing for Europe and, and on the other, on contestation, rejection and transgression of such modes of identification. Addressing the conceptual frame of Europe as a geographical, political, social and cultural entity, the conference papers explored the ways in which "life-mapping" constructs, confirms, contradicts, and erases borders within and in relation to Europe, also raising the question of Europe (and its possible Europeanness) within a larger and more fluid global framework.
Mass Observation (MO) was formed in Britain in 1937 as an innovative research project, to develop new methods for accurately gauging public opinion, thereby contributing to a more democratic form of politics and public policy formation. The archive of its first phase (1937-49) was transferred to the University of Sussex in 1970. In 1981 it was revived as the Mass Observation Project (MOP), which continues to the present. The documentation which MO and MOP together generated includes a significant body of life writings. The purpose of this cluster of articles is to introduce the ways in which the interaction between the aims and approaches of MO's founders and its later MOP refounders, and the responses of its contributors, produced specific forms of life writing; and to explore aspects of the 'afterlife' of these texts – their contextualisation, publication, and interpretation. This introduction situates the original, multifaceted and idiosyncratic, MO project within wider political and cultural trends of the 1930s, and then examines MO's methods, which aimed at 'the observation by everyone of everyone, including themselves'.
In her article "Women's Wartime Life Writing in Early Twentieth-Century China" Li Guo discusses military diaries, prison memoirs, and autobiographical reportages. These documents offer rich insights into the political endeavors and military mobility of women. Guo analyzes Bingying Xie's 1928 war diary about the Chinese nationalists' northern expedition, Langi Hu's 1937 book about anti-Japanese activism, and Lang Bai's 1939 reportage about the Sino-Japanese War and argues that these texts allow women to reconfigure the discourse of nation through experimental life writing in order to develop the genre with tales of valor, hope, struggle, and heroism. Guo argues that contrary to the perception that early twentieth-century Chinese women's military activism was facilitated through assimilation into male identities, Xie's, Hu's, and Bai's texts show that women celebrated their womanhood through mass mobilization and dedicated services at the front as soldiers, activists, and reporters.
This book aims to reflect on the experiential side of writing political lives in the Pacific region. The collection touches on aspects of the life writing art that are particularly pertinent to political figures: public perception and ideology; identifying important political successes and policy initiatives; grappling with issues like corruption and age-old political science questions about leadership and 'dirty hands'. These are general themes but they take on a particular significance in the Pacific context and so the contributions explore these themes in relation to patterns of colonisation and the memory of independence; issues elliptically captured by terms like 'culture' and 'tradition'; the nature of 'self' presented in Pacific life writing; and the tendency for many of these texts to be written by 'outsiders', or at least the increasingly contested nature of what that term means.
This article begins by considering current English as second language (EL2) teaching in Norwegian professional military education (PME) and reflecting on how reading narrative life-writing texts written by former military personnel supports interdisciplinary learning and contributes to the development of English language skills. It then shows how, by building on this current practice, narrative may be developed into a method of critical reading and communication for junior officers. Situating the use of life-writing texts in the context of military interest in narrative in the twenty-first century, and building on insights from life-writing and literacy research, the article argues that the reading of life-writing texts in military EL2 classes should be accompanied by teaching material and reading approaches designed to develop knowledge of narrative structures and techniques and awareness of how the text seeks to affect the reader. It further argues that this knowledge is a transferable skill of use to the military as a flexible communication tool: a narrative method.
Based on "The life and writings of Joseph Mazzini [compiled by Madame Venturi]" London. 1864-70. 6 v. cf. Advertisement. ; Frontispiece is a mounted photograph. ; Mode of access: Internet.
The first two decades of the twenty-first century have seen a plethora of writers, who have challenged and expanded previous notions of feminist life writing. In Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing: The New Audacity, Jennifer Cooke identifies works by thirteen contemporary writers as examples of what she refers to as a new audacity in life writing. Several of these writers are young, early in their careers, and already connected with each other through reviewers or publishers. Defining audacity as a 'public challenge to conventions, characterized by a disregard for decorum, protocol, or moral restraints,' Cooke refers to the thirteen writers as feminists, even when they do not directly engage with politics. Unlike their predecessors, she clarifies further, these writers are writing in the wake of queer, gender and trauma theory, and post-structural critiques of binary thinking. They view identity as social constructions manifested both materially and bodily. Through the perspectives that these writers offer on their lives and the experimental form their writing takes, Cooke argues, they are reshaping feminism and its concerns.
In this article I read autobiographies by East Europeans who immigrated to Canada in connection with the Second World War as examples of transcultural life writing. My focus on the representation of return visits of these loyal Canadian citizens to their country of origin after 1989 reveals the underlying intention of relating the experience of life in a multicultural democratic society to the emergence of a new political consciousness in Eastern Europe. In my analysis I distinguish four types of concerns which try to bridge the past of their childhood experiences with the formation of a transcultural life in the 21st century: 1. Anna Porter's return visit to Hungary for family reunion and an encounter with history in The Storyteller; 2. Modris Eksteins's political motivation in Walking Since Daybreak as a historian who revisits his birthplace in Latvia as well as the stages of his displacement in German refugee camps for research on the history of the war years; 3. Janice Kulyk Keefer's private driving tour of the Ukraine and Poland and the discovery of new political realities in Honey and Ashes; 4. Lisa Appignanesi's search for the traces of the Holocaust in her native Poland in Losing the Dead. These reconnections with an earlier life from the Canadian perspective in transcultural life writings can be likened to the recent discussions of the constitution of transnational societies in a cosmopolitan world.
Attempts to unravel the relationship between scholar and subject are common in life writing and underpin the emphasis on reflexivity in interpretive research. However, while the conceptual basis for reflexive practice is well established, there is less written on how it is actually done. In this article I reflect on how I created a collective portrait of politicians in the Pacific Islands. My rationale for describing how I produced knowledge in this project echoes the call for interpretive researchers and biographers, who wish to become reflexive, to engage in and describe reflexive practices. In doing so, I illustrate how empathy, emotion and intuition shaped my sources, analysis and writing, and argue that these non-objectivist tools, reflexively considered, have the capacity to enhance our descriptions of the lives we choose to portray.
Attempts to unravel the relationship between scholar and subject are common in life writing and underpin the emphasis on reflexivity in interpretive research. However, while the conceptual basis for reflexive practice is well established, there is less written on how it is actually done. In this article I reflect on how I created a collective portrait of politicians in the Pacific Islands. My rationale for describing how I produced knowledge in this project echoes the call for interpretive researchers and biographers, who wish to become reflexive, to engage in and describe reflexive practices. In doing so, I illustrate how empathy, emotion and intuition shaped my sources, analysis and writing, and argue that these non-objectivist tools, reflexively considered, have the capacity to enhance our descriptions of the lives we choose to portray.
