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This article contrasts autobiographies and memoirs written during the post-Franco transition period, exploring the political subjectivities of male and female figures who had been active in the Falangist movement. While the male memoirs emphasize thickening individual agency and unfolding autonomy, the female memoirs are more relational—less individualizing, more heteronomous and displaying an intense preoccupation with and anxiety about fidelity, continuity and lineage. The article argues that the emphasis on fidelity in the women writers' accounts is, at least in part, a function of specific political events—the enforced unification of Nationalist forces in 1937—rather than simply arising from an exaltation of tradition and the fetishizing of essentialized gender norms. The burden of loyalty assumed by the female Falangists after the unification process becomes emplotted into the autobiographical self constructed in their memoirs, reminding us that these women were complex political subjects, even if denied such an identity by the State to which they pledged allegiance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article focuses on cultural encounters by Indian South Africans from Durban and Cape Town, uniquely positioning travel accounts from autobiographies, biographies, and memoirs together with oral histories. A study of individual movements from South Africa to India provides new dimensions to a historiography which has prioritised immigration from India to South Africa and to travel literatures focused on movement from the metropole to the periphery. The narratives are read for what they reveal about identity and the impact of travel. The article argues that there are perceptible differences in masculine and feminine tellings with the latter paying more attention to the domestic and the personal. There is also a difference in the accounts of those who moved by choice and those who were forced into exile. The encounters with India vary from strong identification to isolation and discomfort. Travel sharpened an awareness of being from Africa in India, thereby providing a new definition of self. The narratives are suggestive of how Indians in India respond to the diaspora. Oral histories about dance and music point to how relocation in an Indian group area led to greater cultural activity. These draw Cape Town more closely into twentieth-century Indian Ocean cultural circuits. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper focuses on ethnic life stories written by early twentieth-century Romanian-Jewish immigrants to the US, and attempts to determine to what extent these narratives correspond to the generalised pattern of ethnic life writing at the time, as well as what particularises their texts. I analyse the memoirs of M.E. Ravage, Konrad Bercovici, Maurice Samuel and Edward G. Robinson, all of them born at the close of the nineteenth century but publishing their memoirs at different moments in history. I first trace the images of Romania that spring from these texts, ranging from the legal and educational discrimination portrayed by M.E. Ravage and Edward G. Robinson, to the existence of pogroms and other anti-Jewish feelings foregrounded by Konrad Bercovici, and to the nostalgic shtetl atmosphere evoked in Maurice Samuel's books. I then consider the place of the US in these authors' writings, starting from its utopian image prior to emigration to its more complex image after settlement in the new location. Finally, I show how their return journeys to Romania at different moments in time and the persisting prejudiced atmosphere they found there contributed in all cases to these authors becoming strong supporters of American democracy and its openness to critical debate. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]