Issue Details: First known date: 2017... 2017 [Review Essay] Postcolonial Life Narratives: Testimonial Transactions
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'Gillian Whitlock's Postcolonial Life Narratives: Testimonial Transactions is a timely intervention in the field of postcolonial life writing. Packed with well-researched scholarship and structured in two parts, the book critically addresses some ‘enduring questions on the limits of humanity and humanitarianism, and the “ends” of testimony' (202) through the transaction of testimonial life narratives within a postcolonial discursive frame. Bringing into a productive dialogue between two dynamic fields of contemporary engagement, postcolonialism and life writing, the book ‘mark[s] out a field of postcolonial life writing' (1) exhibiting a significant import of scholarship from some key texts like Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson's Reading Autobiography, Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith's Human Rights and Narrated Lives, Margaretta Jolly's Encyclopedia of Life Writing, Bart Moore-Gilbert's Postcolonial Life-Writing, and Graham Huggan's edited Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies. The book also works through some of the key ideas of thinkers like Franz Fanon, Robert Young, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Achille Mbembe, and Gayatri Spivak, among others. It thus attempts to capitalise on a cross-disciplinary dialogue and scholarship that has started to emerge recently in the critical work of feminist and postcolonial scholars around ‘de/colonising the subject', specifically the critique of what Marlene Kadar, Jeanne Perreault, and Linda Warley in their special issue introduction of the journal ARIEL call, ‘the “Western man” model of autobiography' (1), to accommodate and engage with many other contending genres of life narratives in diverse cultural locations. It is not surprising to witness such a critical move as the origin of autobiography is very often located in the European Enlightenment and the Enlightenment brand of humanism is associated with the ‘auto' of autobiography and its authority. Gillian Whitlock makes a very powerful observation here: ‘autobiography … is now generally reserved for a literary canon that privileges a specific Enlightenment archetype of selfhood: the rational, sovereign subject that is conceived as western, gendered male, and … racially white' (2–3). This critique of ‘“autobiography” as a fixed genre of reference’, as Smith and Watson maintain, has given way to ‘other popular genres of contemporary life narrative, including online forms and graphic memoir, testimonial writing and autoethnography, film and video, and installation art' (14).'  (Introduction)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Life Writing Locating Lives : Papers from the Inaugural Regional IABA Conference, IABA Asia-Pacific vol. 14 no. 4 2017 12015855 2017 periodical issue

    'what are the challenges of thinking about an Asia Pacific region for life writing; what work, if any, has already raised useful questions or can offer cautionary tales about such a concept; and what are the logistical and institutional difficulties of making such an entity viable?'  (Howes, ‘Pacifying Asia, Orienting the Pacific: What Work Can a Life Writing Region Do?’)

    'Over the past decade, in particular, life-writing scholarship, including some excellent work published in this journal, has often focused on regional issues; for instance, locating life writing in its national, cultural, historical, or linguistic context. Such scholarship works to recognise the diverse texts, authors, genres, languages, and so forth that life narrators from different contexts are writing and reading. Centres and research groups for the study of life writing have emerged strongly in this region, for instance, The Center for Biographical Research (CBR) at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, The Centre for Life Writing and Shanghai Jiao Tong University China, The Lingnan University Life Writing Research Program in Hong Kong, the Centre for Cross-Cultural Studies at Kaohsiung Medical University in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, The National Centre of Biography at the Australian National University in Australia, and the Flinders University Life Narrative Research Group in South Australia, to name just a handful of examples. National and regional life writing theory and practice has been mapped at various national and international conferences devoted to life writing scholarship. The most notable of these conferences is the International Auto/Biography Association (IABA) conferences.'  (Editorial introduction)

    2017
    pg. 561-563
Last amended 13 Oct 2017 09:17:35
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