Conference Proceedings & Papers

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Open Access
“You Bite It, You Write It:” Confession in Compulsory Diet Discourse
(2002-05-15) Browne, Kate
When my aunt died last year, she left behind over one hundred diet books. This inheritance, which included not only diet books but also handwritten calorie counts, food journals, marginalia, and weight tracking documents, became an archive that provided important primary sources that aided my dissertation research on confession in weight loss memoir. It also complicated my position as a life writing researcher, bringing to the foreground my own complex, multi-generational history with compulsory diet discourse. In this presentation, I focus specifically on how Weight Watchers, a commercial weight loss program, offers specific instruction in using confession in life writing as self-discipline. I will also share some of my personal archive of food journaling and weight loss blogging to show how Weight Watchers taught me how to write my fat life.
Open Access
Trauma and Testimony: Deconstructing Sexual Violence Narratives in Contemporary Memoir
(2014-05-15) Spallacci, Amanda
According to Marlene Kadar, life writing has developed from a genre to a critical practice, and as a result, “we are able to reconsider the possible functions of life writing now” (11). My paper explores how rape survivors use different forms of life writing to challenge assumptions about sexual violence. Rape myths that constitute rape culture tend to displace the blame for the assault away from the rapist and onto the survivor, using blaming tactics involving “inappropriate” dress, substance use, the survivors’ relationship to the perpetrator, and the very definition of rape. These pervasive beliefs about the culpability and guilt about women who are raped are largely responsible for the lack of respect survivors experience in the court system. As literary and film scholars, we should ask: to what extent do our narrative practices influence rape culture? Conventional narrative techniques restrict survivor’s testimony; however, life writing about trauma resists these oppressive structures, provides a creative outlet for survivors to identify and refute dominant ideologies about violence which have, in the past, prevented them from understanding or identifying with their assault, and allow the survivor to reclaim a sense of political agency within this precarious situation (Gilmore 1994; Henke; Hesford; Morrison). I will consider textual memoir and film such as: Sil Lai Abrams’s Black Lotus: A Women’s Search for Racial Identity, Aspen Matis’s Girl in the Wood, Jessica Valenti’s Sex Object, and Kirby Dick’s The Hunting Ground. Briefly, I will address how the survivor’s body influences personal testimony. This will speak to the recent criticism that scholars tend to ignore, that is to say, how the body factors into life writing and affects the types of narratives people can tell (Smith & Watson 51). Then, I will engage with both literary and clinical theories of trauma to explore how personal narratives of sexual violence resist the myths that have been used to subjugate survivors. Leigh Gilmore states that personal testimony has a “structural entanglement with the law” (Trauma and Testimony 7); historically, the law has exploited memory gaps caused by trauma (Freyd 1998), the way survivors react to trauma (Herman 2003; Lonsway 2009; Lisak; Schwab), nonlinear recollections of trauma (Herman 1997), and cultural rape myths (Hesford; Heberle; Gilmore 2001), in order to discredit survivors’ testimony. Wendy Hesford insists that “strategies of appropriation can subvert dominant rape scripts even if they establish complicity with them” (19). I will analyze the way survivors re-appropriate elements of trauma and rape culture into their narratives, as a form of resistance against the long standing practice of silencing and discrediting survivors’ testimony, and as a means of reasserting their political agency.
Open Access
Autobiographical Genre in the Age of Complexity: A Case Study of Neuro-Autobiographies
(2017-05-15) Valente, Andrea C.
This presentation aims to explore the autobiographical genre under the lenses of an emergent interdisciplinary methodology known as ‘complexity theory’ (Waldrop 1992; Jörg 2011; Wells 2013) in order to provide new insights into non-linear interactions between an autobiographical ‘self’ and its environment. The autobiographical genre gained propulsion during the Enlightenment period as historical men influenced by Newtonian thinking recorded their life reflections and accomplishments (Kadar 1992; Anderson 2011). Since then, autobiographical genre has evolved, becoming more diverse and gendered, including ordinary people’s life stories and voices that are translated and (self)-narrated (Bruner 1987; Smith & Watson 2009). Moreover, the 21st century autobiographical accounts use a variety of media platforms, producing a ‘networked self’ (Jolly 2012) that designs narratives of performance that reverberates experiential stories, as nodes of relationality and intertextuality emerge organically in the public sphere. Hence, autobiographies become complex, undetermined, non-linear and flexible. In this view, I argue that autobiography shifts from a genre to a self-organization model with its sub-types featuring complexity and hybridity. As consequence, the autobiographical ‘self’ also becomes a complex entity. To illustrate this discussion, this presentation focuses on autobiographies of women with brain disorders, to which I use the term ‘neuro-autobiography’. I examine the case of Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroscientist who survived a stroke as a young woman. She narrates and performs her story through different media formats such as a published autobiography and a TED Talk video in the internet. I study how the autobiographical self shifts into an agent category that becomes self-organized and interacts with other agents and actants, that is, humans and objects. Furthermore, I discuss interconnectivity and intertextuality as important nodes in a rhetorical ecology that allows the autobiographical agent to engage and act/react from within outward.
Open Access
Crossing Borders with LGBTQ Descendants of Holocaust Survivors Life Writing: History, Trauma, and the Queer Autobiographical
(2017-05-15) Evoy, Jacob
This paper investigates the intersecting roles of sexuality, gender, race, and nationalism within the life writings of LGBTQ children of Holocaust survivors. While much work has examined intergenerational trauma within the writing of descendants of the Holocaust, only a few have acknowledged and interrogated the importance of sexuality within the lives and writings of these individuals. My paper utilizes queer theory to read and situate these authors’ works in new contexts. Drawing upon queer theoretical concepts of trauma (Ann Cvetkovich), history and temporality (Heather Love and Scott Bravmann), and reparative reading practices (Eve Sedgwick), I unpack some of the common and alternative themes of the pieces written by LGBTQ children of Holocaust survivors. Texts in this study include (but are not limited to): Lisa Kron’s Two and a Half Minute Ride (2001), Lev Raphael’s Dancing on Tisha B’av (1988), Journey and Arrivals (1996), and My Germany (2009), as well as Sarah Schulman’s Rat Bohemia (1995), People in Trouble (1990), and The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Generation (2012). My paper situates these works within larger narratives of (queer) history, trauma, and activism as these works traverse from the individual to the collective. Of particular note, this paper examines how trauma is present within the everyday lives of queer folk while simultaneously interacting with other traumatic events and their legacies. My paper investigates the everyday aspects of trauma as they are situated alongside and within homo- and hetero- normative life scripts. From Kron’s retelling of her sibling’s wedding to Raphael’s sexual encounters with uncircumcised Jewish men, to Schulman’s witnessing of lost cultures and counter publics, these texts bring together legacies of sexuality, gender, race, and nationality that are tied to larger traumatic events such as the Holocaust, homophobia, and the AIDS epidemic.
Open Access
Collections and Collaborations for Writing Black Women’s Wellness: Narratives of Practical Research, Pedagogy, and Practice
(2017-05-15) Evans, Stephanie
Stephanie Y. Evans will discuss her online library of Black women’s memoirs from around the globe and highlight research themes of Black women’s wellness through life writing. Specifically, the curator of this database will show how creation of the digital humanities resource inspired collaborative publications about mind, body, and spirit health for Black women. Projects grounded in life writing include mental health (mind), Black women yoga instructors (spirit), and a community-based project on soup stories as cultural paths to nutrition (body). AfricanaMemoirs.net is an online resource of over 500 narratives created to encourage research grounded in Black women's life stories. This open access database enhances narrative study and broadens the scope of autobiography, memoir, and epistolary writing as a genre. Most importantly, this website inspires the next generation of authors to read and write life stories for empowerment. In the tradition of Sesheta, the Egyptian goddess known as "lady of the house of books," this library gathers together a chorus of voices from around the world and Africana women's stories are as numerous as the spots on Sesheta's leopard print dress. The main theme of these stories is what Anna Julia Cooper calls regeneration. Professor Evans teaches various topics through memoir and the collection allows students to look backward, look inward, and look forward to identify relevant historical and contemporary issues. This presentation will also discuss creative ways to engage memoir as a teaching tool for community service-learning courses that connect with high school curricula. The book Black Passports: Travel Memoirs as Tools for Youth Empowerment (SUNY 2014), provides an example of how research can enhance student learning outcomes for all levels of learning. The presentation will close with discussion of current projects including a memoir review library in the works.
Open Access
Writings of the Self through Mystical Experience within Santo Daime
(2017-05-15) Lee, Henrique de Oliveira
This presentation will be presenting partial results of the research project on “Writings of the self and mystical experience within Santo Daime”. This research is funded by FAPEMAT, a Brazilian state agency for research funding and technology development. Santo Daime is a Brazilian religion based on syncretic symbols of popular Christianity, Amazonian indigenous shamanism and afro Brazilian mediunic incorporation. During the Santo Daime´s cults ayahuasca (a indigenous brew made out by leafs and vime) is consumed producing intense mystical experience as it is accounted by the rituals participants. Whether in an anthropological approach or in a pharmacological frame, there are much scientific attention to all religion practice evolving the use of ayahuasca nowadays in Brazil. Despite of these main approaches to the phenomenon of ayahuasca consumption this research project points at other epistemological direction while it investigates how a mystical experience is built as a written account of oneself. In some cases there is a remarkable connection between having a mystical experience and being compelled to give an account of oneself. In this first stage of the research we investigate published material by two authors who have written accounts on their experiences within Santo Daime´s rituals. The first is the poet and ex-participant of guerrilla movement in Brazil Alex Polari. He has published the book “O guia da floresta” in 1992 as an autobiographical account of his first experience in the Santo Daime community in the middle of the Brazilian rain forest. The second is the Argentinian anthropologist and also poet Nestor Perlongher who lived in Brazil and took part in a research group on ayahuasca but the account of his mystical experience is mostly in the genre of essay in a book “Prosa plebéia”. My goal for this proposal is to investigate in both texts how the mystical experience is bound to an intense process of redescription of the self which compelled these two authors to give written accounts of themselves.
Open Access
Mar and Me: Following the Traces
(2017-05-15) Warley, Linda
In this paper I will trace the influence that Marlene Kadar's scholarship has had on my own thinking, while making more general comments about personal writing and collaborative research as feminist practices. . Marlene and I, along with Jeanne Perreault and (for the first volume Susanna Egan) co-edited two books and one special issue of a journal together. But it was not until I read her essay for our first book, Tracing the Autobiographical (2005), that I really saw how much Kadar could stretch the idea of life writing even further and find even more lives, vulnerable lives, in the most unexpected places. Kadar adds traces and fragments to our understanding of autobiographical practices. The expansiveness of her thinking cuts a path for others to follow.
Open Access
Crip Intrusions: Affect-ive Readings of Disability
(2017-05-15) Neuman, Syndey
I will engage with affective experiences of disability that are silenced within dominant discourses of disability theory. In order to tease out the particularities of the silences and absences I aim to address, I will examine various instances of life writing/life narrative, focusing on the tellings of disabled, queer, and/or racialized writers. Within my research, there is a great deal of motion and overlap between primary and secondary sources, creative and scholarly texts. Much of the theory I engage with writes and/or performs affects and sensations at the same time as it explores their content and form (or lack thereof). Likewise, much of the life writing I engage with has explicitly theoretical implications. In keeping with a feminist tradition of appreciating the situated-ness of bodies of/and knowledge, my research engages with work exhibiting forms of embodied situated-ness that is mobile, shifting, and prone to slippage. With this commitment in mind, I explore various forms of “life writing” or “life narrative,” understood as attempts to communicate bodies and selves within and perhaps beyond particular social, political, economic contexts. I focus on the ways in which processes of meaning making, communication, and engagement are themselves affective encounters among bodies. While dominant processes of life writing often function as means of communicating, and in the process constructing, a particular self, I will read these texts for the moments where affects erupt into the text—where any search for a stable self to tell is abandoned and the complicated, messy aspects of corporeal experiences emerge.
Open Access
Masculinity and Migration: The Black Atlantic Lives of Henry Highland Garnet and Peter Thomas Stanford
(2017-05-15) McCaskill, Barbara
Rev. Henry Highland Garnet (1815-82) and Rev. Peter Thomas Stanford (c. 1860-1909) were nineteenth-century African American ministers whose dramatic lives intersected. Both descended from enslaved black southerners; both emerged as charismatic preachers in Brooklyn, New York’s radical antislavery community; and, predating the innovative work of W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963), both became passionate advocates for providing access for talented African American youth to a classical and liberal arts educations beyond the grammar school level. Garnet was one of Stanford’s spiritual and political mentors, and helped place him in summer jobs to finance his college education. For this meeting of the International Auto/Biography Association, I will focus on how Garnet and Stanford constructed notions of gender and race as part of a collective project of shaping a political and economic agenda for African Americans in the decades after the Civil War. They are no longer household names among Anglophone readers, yet each of their stories marked milestone moments in early African American print culture. The Sketch of the Life and Labors of Rev. Henry Highland Garnet (1865), as told by the abolitionist James McCune Smith, was in fact commissioned for printing in Washington, DC, by the US Congress after Garnet became the first black man invited to speak there. Nearly one-half century later, Stanford’s firsthand memoir From Bondage to Liberty (1889) highlighted his historic appointment as the first black minister of a church in the working class city of Birmingham, England. These texts, I argue, subvert conventional discussions of black masculinity and citizenship in order to facilitate post-Emancipation goals of educational opportunities, political suffrage, and transnational antiracist collaborations. Similarly, the hybrid forms of their stories, which challenge the aesthetics of ex-slaves’ narratives, reflect a new post-Emancipation agenda for African Americans.
Open Access
Black Feminist Intersectional Methodologies for Life Writing
(2017-05-15) Moody, Joycelyn
This panel is comprised of three black feminist presenters whose research topics and intersectional methodologies are inspired by recognitions of the same gender and genre provocations that drive the work of Canadian auto/biography theorist Marlene Kadar. For the 2017 meeting of the IABA Americas, we present three papers that explore how and where blackness, femaleness, interlocution, Rhetoric Studies, qualitative interviews, gendered cultural studies, and black print culture studies intersect with life writing. Our papers individually and collectively theorize outcomes of life writings by, about, and for black women developed through interdisciplinary and intersectional approaches. Moreover, we analyze ways black women’s life narratives are crafted and/or collected. Our papers investigate diverse processes of generating life writing when auto /biographical subjects are as resistant, elusive, and/or dissident as they are obliging.
Open Access
In Search of the Black Fantastic
(2017-05-15) Ards, Angela
In Search of the Black Fantastic, Richard Iton’s theorizing about the “anticolonial labor” of cultural actors who disassemble and reimagine the nation in a post-colonial era resonates with Edwidge Danticat’s essay collection Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Writer at Work, where she outlines her own philosophy of the artist’s social role. In this paper, I draw on both Iton’s cultural theories and Danticat’s essay collection to argue that her memoir, Brother, I'm Dying, performs such political work as it explores the diasporic dimensions of contemporary black cultural formation. The memoir chronicles a triad of events: the author’s unexpected pregnancy; her father’s terminal diagnosis; her uncle’s tragic death while in U.S. Customs. On the one hand, Brother, I’m Dying is a testimonio, a collective story that speaks out against injustice to gain agency through narration, as her uncle’s death in detention provided the original catalyst for this protest against imperialism. But the memoir is also a creation myth, a myth of origins, in which Danticat contemplates the influence of her uncle and father, her “two papas,” on her formation as an immigrant writer. This paper demonstrates that, as much as this memoir is about mourning her father’s and uncle’s deaths, and Haiti’s travails since independence, it also revisits Danticat’s own immigrant odyssey. The story of the black nation and subjectivity has traditionally been the story of men, with women serving only as mothers and mates that created male heirs. In creating subjectivity through nonlinear, dialogic structures in the vein of black feminists writers such as Mae G. Henderson and Audre Lorde, Brother, I’m Dying joins an intellectual tradition of black feminist writing on diaspora. Chronicling her subject formation at the hands of her father and uncle, all the while positioning herself as a mother-to-be, Danticat creates a black diasporic subjectivity beyond gender and nation.
Open Access
Judy Chicago, the 1960s, and the Metaphor of Sex
(2017-05-15) Reeve, Charles
“Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?” the feminist collective Guerrilla Girls once asked, underscoring visual art’s view of women as objects. Unsurprisingly, this masculinism underpins much life writing by visual artists—from Benvenuto Cellini in the Renaissance to Larry Rivers in the late 20th century. However, as feminism infiltrated visual art, women’s voices began to be heard, particularly when, from the early 1970s to the early 1980s, women artists recalled the 1960s: Kate Millett (Flying [1974]; Sita [1977]), Judy Chicago (Through the Flower [1975]) and Anne Truitt (Daybook [1984]). Moreover, these women all would produce further reminiscences and their books would be joined by later reflections on the 1960s like Faith Ringgold’s We Flew Over the Bridge (1995), Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Net (2011) and Eva Hesse’s dairies (2016). Reading their books against the cultural and politic tendencies of the 1960s, we see these artists adopting various positions relative to the 1960s’ visual idioms: feminism destroyed Chicago’s engagement with minimalism while tempering Truitt’s engagement with minimalism little if at all, and Ringgold’s intersection of feminism and black activism precluded engaging with that moment’s formalist avant-garde at all. Furthermore, this range of engagements with the artistic avant-garde mirrors a range of engagements with what we might call the sexual avant-garde. Truitt (and, later, Ringold and Hesse) discussed her sexuality modestly. By contrast, Chicago and Millett (and, later, Kusama) foreground sexuality and sexual activity, modeling a sexual agency that opposed the objectifying masculinity dismantled by Millett in Sexual Politics (1970). But at a time when sexual liberation was widely celebrated while almost always turning out to mean male sexual liberation, this emphatic female sexual agency seems like a metonym for female agency in general, its urgency facilitated by the art world’s perennially Romantic injunction to be oneself.
Open Access
Frayed Edges: Mediating Women in Popular Culture
(2017-05-15) Dubrofsky, Rachel
A decade and a half ago, at my thesis defense, Dr. Marlene Kadar said: “your work is interdisciplinary, so it will always have frayed edges. That is part of the richness.” Dr. Kadar’s devotion to critical innovative groundbreaking scholarship—that aims to change lives and worldviews—honoring the messiness of the process, taught me to see the richness in the details, seek out the contradictions and paradoxes. My work tells the stories of how women are mediated, to open up larger questions about the mundane, everyday ways in which misogyny and racism are made normal and the complicated and conflicted manner in which popular culture tells these stories. My talk explores how my work lays bare the contingent, contextual and complex experiences of the women who inhabit popular media spaces and are the focus of my research, which is grounded in a Critical Cultural Studies tradition and propelled by early invaluable lessons from Dr. Kadar.
Open Access
Unmake Happy: Bo Burnham’s Madly Deviant DIY Identity Play
(2017-05-15) Jerreat-Poole, Adan
This paper explores DIY comedian Bo Burnham’s playfully depressed comedy as a multimodal form of Mad life writing, one that articulates a resistant mode of living under and against sanist neoliberal narratives of self-improvement, cure, and prescriptive/restrictive happiness. Employing Mary Flanagan’s (2009) theory of “critical play,” this paper considers the transgressive potential of play and playfulness in emerging Mad digital autobiographical practices. Burnham is an active YouTuber and social media user, and his identity performances are therefore situated within an emerging set of web 2.0 life writing practices that entangle online and offline lives, rely on audience interaction and collaboration, and struggle to work with, through, against, and around normative and normalizing neoliberal digital structures. Social media platforms increasingly coax autobiographical acts as a method of transforming online lives into marketable/saleable products (Taylor 2014; Fuchs 2014; Morrison 2014). Depressive bodies, or bodies in the midst of a panic attack, are not productive capitalist tools, and these autobiographical acts are discouraged in spaces of online identity performance— even as the pressure to perform the self online produces mass anxiety, particularly among younger users (millennials) (McNeill and Zuern 2015). As millennial Bo Burnham plays with depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide in his highly performative and self-reflexive comedy, he embodies Ann Cvetkovich’s (2012) call for creative practice as a mode of living with depression. Discussing two of his shows, what. (2013) and Make Happy (2016), I identify three potential tactics of madly resistant identity performance: 1) irony/satire, 2) play, and 3) new media. Through these tactics, Burnham enacts depressive agency by counter-storying dominant narratives of mental illness, critiquing sanist/ableist digital structures and practices, and embodying empathy and playfulness as modes of relating to and with Mad bodies. Mad social media users can adopt these modes of willful resistance in our own identity performances.
Open Access
Childhood Exile: Memories and Returns
(2017-05-15) Arfuch, Leonor
In the context of contemporary forced migrations, my paper tackles the problem of political exile. I will take as my main area of concern a unique experience—that of children whose parents were obliged to escape the repression of the Chilean (1973-1989) and Argentinian (1976- 1983) dictatorships and for whom living “outside the lines” was often a matter of life and death. I am referring to children born in exile and who were affected by family trauma, or exiled-children who moved with their parents toward an uncertain destiny, carrying with them only a few objects as vestiges of home. Some of these children were later sent to Cuba to live in the care of “social parents,” caretakers who took responsibility for the children when the children’s militant parents decided to return to their countries of origin to fight against the dictatorships. My analysis will focus on recent works by four women who have lived through these experiences and whose narratives lie “outside the lines” of canonical genres: Verónica Gerber-Bicceci and Laura Alcoba (Argentina), who have written autobiographical and self-fictional novels; Macarena Aguiló (Chile) and Virginia Croatto (Argentina), who have produced autobiographical and testimonial films. Despite differences in style, we find in their cultural production some undeniable marks of gender –looks, images, assessments- that reveal unique subjectivities. In all of these narratives, personal experience interfaces with collective memory and, for that reason, has an important ethical and political impact.
Open Access
“Down the Rabbit Hole”: Building Self-Reflexive Pedagogy in Autobiographical Writing
(2017-05-15) Lugo, Celia Ayala
We undergo a certain type of “down-the-rabbit hole” experience, when we end our years as students and begin a new chapter as teachers. This process may be amplified when one is an ESL teacher, teaching English as a second language. As a Basic English instructor at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez, facing new challenges, both as a graduate student and a college- level instructor, I have found the process to be similar to how Alice figures out how to fit into this new world called Wonderland, which is completely different to her home in England. Beginning teachers are so busy and get caught up easily in their work. They rarely have time to reflect on themselves as educators. But, when teachers create spaces for themselves to reflect, they improve their teaching and create new spaces for students to reflect on themselves and their studying. In this presentation, then, I will be discussing my experience leading a workshop for teachers in which I used the metaphor of falling down the rabbit hole as a means of modeling pedagogical autoethnographic practices for teachers of English as a second language. I will use Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, as a tool to explain my analogy of Alice entering the rabbit hole as a means of explaining the new teacher experience – including teachers who are new to teaching and teachers entering new academic situations. I will then demonstrate examples of the writing activities that I designed and led at the Puerto Rico Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (PRTESOL) workshop, in November 2016. This project was created as a means of both supporting the school teachers of Puerto Rico and for studying the ways in which teachers self-reflect on the multiple attributes of their teaching environments within an ESL context.
Open Access
#FreeBree as a ‘Relay of Witnessing’: Remediation, Crowdsourcing, and Activist Art
(2017-05-15) Brophy, Sarah
On June 27, 2015, ten days after the shootings that killed nine worshippers at Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, including Senator Clementa C. Pinckney, artist-activist Bree Newsome engaged in direct action by climbing up to remove the Confederate flag that had continued to fly at full mast at the state capitol even as others were lowered in mourning. Images of Newsome’s actions, words, subsequent arraignment, and of the return of the flag up the pole 45 minutes later, were then—and continue to be—widely circulated through a variety of media modes, including TV news segments and a host of videos, photos, GIFS, memes, graphic fan art, and blog posts. This paper thinks through the role of remediation and crowdsourcing in distributing, archiving, and amplifying the impact Newsome’s project. Cognizant of the increasing corporate routinization of user-generated online responses to contemporary art, I propose that Newsome’s public-facing embodied performance illustrates that remediation and crowdsourcing can, nonetheless, be mobilized as powerfully critical and political modalities. To develop this argument, I draw, first, on the conceptualization of digital portraiture as a “cumulative, serial” genre (Walker Rettberg), reading Newsome’s direct-action performance-for-video as enacting Black feminist and radical philosophies and practices of resistance to anti-Black visual surveillance (Browne, Harney and Moten, Fleetwood) and as prompting followers/fans to extend the temporal and spatial reach of the intervention. Then, I will show the relevance of Pramrod Nayar’s concept of “radical graphics” for artistic-activist practices of remediation and crowdsourcing by analyzing the large online archive of drawings and memes portraying Newsome as a superhero: an alternative icon that makes it possible feel and remember history differently. Creatively co-constructed and widely re-circulated, Newsome’s Black female embodiment of courage, fugitivity, planning, faith, and persistence counters the dominant narration of the Charleston shootings, which has circulated ambiguously around the hateful motives and mental health of white shooter Dylan Roof, as well as the broader amnesiac and white supremacist post-slavery historical surround (Sharpe). Finally, I will theorize social media users/audiences as picking up “the relay of witnessing” (Chambers; cf. McNeill). Posts tagged #FreeBree echoed and amplified Newsome’s declaration that “I did it because I am free,” and thus followers/co-creators can be understood as sharing in the ongoing, concerted labour of what the artist has called “tearing hate from the sky.” Through this case study analysis, the paper will contribute significant insights into the complex relationship between digital technologies, on the one hand, and collective artistic practices of self-inscription and witnessing, on the other, in the Movement for Black Lives at a time when “the touch of the digital” (Hudson and Zimmermann), the racialized distribution of “digital labour” (Nakamura), and the logic of “distributed storage” (Van Dijck) constitute the new matrix of critical political art and activism.
Open Access
Disruption: Maya Angelou and the Singing Body
(2017-05-15) Burnett, Kimberly
This presentation will provide of brief overview of the singing body in Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas (1976), and All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986). I examine how Angelou’s focus on the singing body allows a critical re-imagining of black female embodiment in which the body and the mind are interconnected. I contend that the singing body is itself, as Spillers suggests, a form of writing— a “hieroglyphic” that speaks as much to the experience of black female being as the literary text. In this presentation, I will share selected recordings of Maya Angelou’s own singing to consider questions such as: What does it mean to consider music as an archive in Angelou’s work? Specifically, what does the singing body mean for a construction of black female identity or black feminist identity? In addition to exploring challenges of the process itself and what they reveal about our values and assumptions as scholars, I will examine the significance of re- thinking the boundary lines of the body (lived experience) and voice (the expression of the mind) and what lies at the intersection. In particular, I am interested in questioning what remains troubling about the mind/soul or body/spirit connection in the re-telling of one’s life and what it proffers to discussions about gender. I argue that the singing body in Angelou’s writing disrupts normalized narratives of black female subjectivity and internalizes a discussion of boundary and dislocation within the black female body.
Open Access
Burning the Boundaries of Political Action: Feminism, Anarchy, and Militancy in Anne Hansen’s Direct Action: Memoirs of an Urban Guerilla
(2017-05-15) McKenna, Emma
In this paper, I situate Canadian political anarchist Anne Hansen’s writing within the genre of feminist memoir, and her activism within feminist history. On November 22 1982, the firebombing of three Red Hot Video stores in Vancouver’s Lower Mainland made national media headlines. The nascent feminist group the Wimmin’s Fire Brigade—of which Hansen was a part—claimed responsibility for the action, declaring it an act of “self-defense against hate propaganda.” I suggest that the firebombing marks a turning point for Canadian feminist activism not simply because of the use of violence by women against the state and private capital, but because of the failure of the state to intervene on a new form of capitalism that commodifies violence against women. In demonstrating how the materiality of violence against women was undergoing a remarkable historical shift through the creation of and distribution of commercial representations of sexualized violence against women, I argue that feminists in early 1980s Canada were facing unchartered political terrain. Despite the novelty of the firebombing, the only publication that examines this event thoroughly is Ann Hansen’s memoir. I suggest that Hansen’s memoir may be overlooked within feminist literary studies due to her theorization of women as active participants in oppositional violence and criminal sabotage. Through an examination of her personal writing, communiqués, and court statements, I examine her politicization via anarchist and feminist principles. I argue for the importance of disrupting what counts as feminist agency under particular historical conditions, and for the inclusion of narratives of women’s violence within our own stories of what counts as feminism.
Open Access
Can I Be a Witness? Reflections on Witnessing and Ethics from a Stó:lō Text
(2017-05-15) Beard, Laura
In Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson note that “acts of witnessing propel a variety of life narratives” (286). While we find acts of witnessing propelling a variety of life narratives, the act of witnessing itself is culturally specific and attentiveness to that cultural specificity and the ethics it compels pose challenges for autobiography scholars eager to propel themselves into a variety of life narratives. Memory Serves: Oratories (2016) brings together seventeen speeches and lectures from the acclaimed Stó:lō author and orator Lee Maracle into one published text. While each oratory- turned-essay can stand on its own, when read together, they help readers to understand how knowledge is contained in story, indeed, how governance, knowledge, memory and story intertwine in the Stó:lō worldview Maracle shares. Maracle presents herself as a respected witness, or si’yam, and discusses the reciprocal recognition of her witnessing and the responsibility that imposes. In this brief paper, I discuss both the culturally specific presentation of witnessing in Maracle’s oratories and writings and the ways in which we, as life narrative scholars, might learn from this Stó:lō worldview.