Search

Troubling Truth and Reconciliation in Canadian Education: Critical Perspectives, Edmonton, University of Alberta Press, 2022, 328 pp., $46.99 (paper), ISBN 978-1-77212-600-6. 30 Tepperman, Lorne and Maria Finnsdottir, Canada's Place: A Global Perspective, Oakville, ON, Rock's Mills Press, 2022, 222 pp., CAN $35.00 (paper), ISBN 978-1-77244-230-4. 31 West, Leah, Thomas Juneau, and Amarnath Amarasingam, eds., Stress Tested: The COVID-19 Pandemic and Canadian National Security, Calgary, University of Calgary Press, 2022, 280 pp., $34.99 (paper), ISBN 978-1-77385-243-0. 32 Wilson, Michael, Something within Me: A Personal and Political Memoir, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2022, 302 pp., CAN $24.95 (paper) ISBN 978-1-4875-4438-6. The I American Review of Canadian Studies i has received the following books for review. [Extracted from the article]

The paper deals with the sudden experience of an unfamiliar feeling due to the blurring of the boundaries between the private and the public space, resulting in what Bhabha calls 'unhomely.' It has been further argued that this sudden emergence of unfamiliar experiences acts as a traumatic event, represented through graphic narration in Malik Sajad's Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir. The sense of 'unhomeliness' caused due to various factors like constant surveillance is responsible for the traumatic feeling in Munnu. The paper also explores the idea of the panopticon, which engenders the blurring of the boundaries between the home and the world. The blurred boundaries make our private space strange and unfamiliar, which is supposed to be an intimate place without any invasion by the external world. Therefore, the present study explores the notion of 'unhomely' and the trauma caused by it, as represented in the graphic narration of the events through dreams and nightmares. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As embodied agents of interlocuters in communicative encounters, professional interpreters use the narrated 'I' to tell the stories of others, while the narrating 'I', that is the interpreter's personal self, is often kept invisible for the sake of performing the professional role. This paper focuses on three contemporary interpreters' memoirs that recount their life and work experiences in different locations and settings. The paper explores how interpreter-memoirists challenge the expectation for interpreter's non-affectivity by exercising their affective labour and adjusting their empathetic positioning in their work as interpreters. With a focus on empathy as affective labour, I investigate how these interpreter-memoirists perform their professional roles by handling emotionally charged scenarios in different ways. I argue that interpreters can function as agents of empathy who are capable of modulating speaker-intended emotions and coping with the impact of empathy as part of their felt and regulated emotions. The fact that the empathy is negotiated and mediated by interpreters challenges normative views on the interpreter's objectivity and neutrality. This study offers new possibilities for reinstating interpreters' agency in handling empathy and acknowledging the positive outcome of interpreters' affective work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Of the many memoirs of parents published in North America since the early 1990s, the great majority concern fathers rather than mothers. This pattern reflects the relational dynamics of the post-war middle-class nuclear family, typified by an absent bread-earning father and an available home-making mother. Memoirs of fathers (patriographies) tend to emerge from relationships that were experienced (by the writers) as deficient in some way or other. The books are best read not as static representations of fathers (i.e., biographies), whether favourable or not, but rather as attempts to claim or even fashion a relationship with a father who is absent—because of death, geographical distance, or emotional reserve. A significant number have to do with fathers who were creative intellectuals—writers, artists, and so on. In such cases, the child often has a fraught relationship to the father's body of work. For one thing, the father's creative work is what removes him from the house or sequesters him within it. Moreover, insofar as the father's intellectual labour produces a species of progeny, it may provoke a kind of virtual sibling rivalry. Furthermore, the work is generally available to a wider public, with whom the child may feel competitive. The writing of the memoir often attempts to renegotiate the parent-child relationship, in part by establishing a new relationship to the father's body of work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a memoir of/for Daryl. A memoir is an historical account or biography written from personal knowledge. It provides my personal account of Daryl, the man, the physical educator, the intellectual, the teacher, and the scholar. In this account I trace Daryl's work from when I first met him in 1981 and the major conceptual ideas that drove his research and scholarship. I discuss his commitment to behaviour analysis, his integrity and his politics. I try to convey the ways in which he thought about research and the world more generally. I also give an insight into Daryl the advisor and, in particular, what he meant for his international PhD students and how, through them, his influence spread across many countries of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nick Hornby's memoir, Fever Pitch (1992) is pivotal in deepening our understanding of the experience of the western male football (soccer) fan and has received proportionate academic scrutiny. In contrast, its two film adaptations have received very little. Significantly, these adaptations, one football (1997 UK), one baseball (2005 US), foreground a heterosexual romantic relationship and weight the success of this relationship with a woman whose character is transformed from uninitiated to deeply connected, 'authentic' fan. Yet, this transformative experience can be seen to undermine, or delegitimize, the fandom of women in sports domains. Where studies of women as fans in film and literature are limited and studies of the women in the central roles in Hornby's sports' texts even more so, this paper seeks to situate women as 'real fans' in fictional narratives alongside those in other emergent forms of contemporary sporting fandom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The trauma experienced by survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima manifests itself in various ways when they commit their stories to paper. Through practice-based research into translating the atomic narratives in Personal Accounts of the Atomic Bomb, this article explores how the translator can analyse the source language articulation of trauma to transmit the unfamiliar and unfathomable experience of the A-bomb. Drawing upon Deane-Cox's concept of the translator as the secondary witness, this paper emphasises the centrality of metaphorical images invoked by trauma survivors and draws the translator's focus to the cultural references embedded within. It also highlights the survivors' use of sensory perceptions as a means of giving shape to their experiences, creating an illocutionary intensity that must be retained in translation. Exploring the translation of trauma narratives not only expands the breadth of research into trauma translation but also makes more widely available first-person accounts of the physical and emotional impact of the A-bomb in Hiroshima. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that we should understand Margaret Cavendish and Lucy Hutchinson as secretaries in the practically activist humanist tradition. Both women served as keepers of (family and political) secrets, and as readers, writers, and record keepers of papers. Hutchinson calls herself 'the faithful depository' of her husband's 'secrets', and alludes to her facility with his signature, or 'character', throughout the Memoirs. In many ways, the Memoirs themselves are a vindication of his belief in her capacities. Margaret Cavendish similarly presents herself as her husband's secretary, including in her 'Life of William Cavendish' not only a robust and notably politic account of her husband's expenditures on behalf of the monarchy – 'a Computation of My Lord's Losses' – but also a record of 'some Essayes and Discourses of My Lords, together with some Notes and Remarques of mine own'. In doing so, Cavendish remarshalls the consiliary wisdom of William Cavendish's own advice to princes as ballast for his continued political relevance and for her own secretarial and advisory competency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I am delighted to have been presented with this opportunity to provide some reflections on my time as past editor of Accounting and Business Research (ABR) as part of the conference being organised to mark the 50th year anniversary of the founding of the journal. I am also a little apprehensive. When I retired in 2018, I scrapped all the files I had retained relating to my time as an editor on the grounds that I was short of space. I hadn't looked at them for years and deemed it unlikely I would ever have reason to do so in the future. Perhaps I should have followed the example of the writer Clive James and called these reflections my unreliable memoirs (James 1981). The comments that follow are inevitably based heavily on things I remember rather than written records. Unfortunately, neurologists tell us that when we recall things, we reshape them to meet the needs of the moment, and in doing so subtly alter our memories. Where possible, I have tried to cross-check the accuracy of my recollections - no doubt with mixed success. The reader is warned!. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the process of identity formation as it pertains to two Palestinian American women in the United States, specifically in New York City. It considers the answer to a characteristically conversational question in the West: "What is this Palestine, anyway?" through a reading of Najla Said's and Suheir Hammad's memoirs, Looking for Palestine: Growing Up Confused in an Arab-American Family (New York: Riverhead Books, 2013) and Drops of This Story (New York: Writers & Readers, 1996), respectively. While the memoirs are set in socioeconomically different parts of New York City, both narrators chronicle their complicated negotiations around issues of belonging, integration, self-worth, and body shame as second-generation Palestinian women in the United States. The paper argues for the necessity to narrate such experiences, or else risk being outwritten by various Others. Given the reality of "Palestine" geographically and politically, the literary space can be powerful in locating and registering an imagined postcolonial Palestinian experience today. It can coherently articulate a broken Self, rehabilitate body politics, retrace violently digressive journeys, find meaning in a confounding kind of nationalism, and resist dominant and hostile ideologies. Indeed, the act of narration could not only heal the fraught relations between the Palestinian Self and various Others, but can allow for the envisioning of a postcolonial space from within. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This autoethnographic paper relives my first working night as a male stripper. The purpose of this paper is to examine my subjectivities as a male stripper by unpacking and theorizing around my autoethnographic writings from working at a private bachelorette party. This paper provides a new perspective in the sex and leisure literature and puts the (male) researcher into the study. It explores the complexities and vulnerabilities entangled within my subjectivities as a male stripper – its construction, deconstruction, and co-construction. Narratives are presented depicting scenes during my first working night from pre-party preparations to post-party reflections. These narratives analyze my desires to be accepted beyond the traditional physicality central to stripping, tensions present within role ambiguity, and the co-consumption of sexuality produced within this sex and leisure space. Critical analysis of my performer perspective advances the understanding of identity co-construction and co-consumption within these sociosexual leisure spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My research highlights the complex relationship between narrative and temporality whilst exploring the narrative configuration of the Arab revolution. My paper situates the memoirs of Libyan novelist Hisham Matar's The Return and Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif's Cairo: My City, Our Revolution, and their first-hand experience of the revolution in Libya and Egypt within the genre of memory and writing. The stated work is investigated to emphasize how both writers configure the immediate, historical, social, and political dimensions of the revolution. By transcribing the time of revolution into narratives, both writers attempt to preserve a watershed moment of the Arab history and portray collective as well as individual memory. I argue that through their acts of witnessing/writing/remembering, not only do these writers historicize the present but also produce narrative memory by articulating collective utterances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the memories of Japanese teachers who worked in Korea during the colonial period. By focusing on the autobiographical narratives of three Japanese primary school teachers who worked in rural Korea between 1931 and 1945, this study aims to unpack the relatively under-studied aspects of colonialism. Their narratives carried personal histories regarding their choice to study and work in Korea, the nature of their relationship with Korean children, and the memories of the political and cultural atmosphere at schools in pre-war Korea. These memoirs were accounts of Japanese colonialism through the "Japanese eyes". As they intimately interacted with the local community and students, their memories were multifaceted and complicated; these were not simply apologetic or nostalgic but involved particular social relations that they had experienced in Korea. In this paper, I attempted to shed light on the reconstruction of the grander narrative of pre- and post-war educational history in the region by looking at the complexity of their "reflected" memories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to study the impacts of complex political changes on the material and socio-cultural dimensions of the heritage gardens, which initially belonged to the nobilities of Shiraz. The paper scrutinises the factors that have altered the gardens' lives during the Festival of Arts in the 1960s, followed by the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Through employing interpretive-historical research methods and examining primary sources including memoirs, memos, documents, and interviews conducted with managers involved in heritage affairs, the paper details how political, social, and economic parameters affected the Shiraz gardens. While the political states interpreted the heritage differently, possible factors responsible for changing the life of gardens are put forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1640s, Lucy Hutchinson (1620–1681) wrote a manuscript account of her husband's "services" to the city of Nottingham, a text to which she would return when she came to write the Memoirs of the Life of Colonel John Hutchinson in the 1660s. As well as a detailed description of civil-war Nottinghamshire, this early manuscript traces the factious relationships between the Independent, John Hutchinson, and his fellow Presbyterian committee members from 1641–1645. This factionalism was visible on a national scale in the mid-1640s, as divisions within Parliamentary forces played out in public thanks to the rising popularity of the printed pamphlet. This paper explores the links between Hutchinson's seemingly private manuscript account and this burgeoning form of public news. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces the multi-dimensional aspects to South Indian coolie life in nineteenth and early twentieth century Malaya to interject into decades of scholarship that has trained on a homogenous focus on plantation fieldwork. In search of the nuances of diasporic diversity, I located three memoirs written by European planters of the Malayan plantocracy, set in rubber plantations and selected primarily for their reflections of South Indian coolie life from various socio-cultural angles. My reading of the three memoirs uncovered a host of various micro-narratives surrounding South Indians in the plantation, including references to cattle rearing, legacies of ancient ayurveda practices as well as the participatory communal network between coolie women as wage earners, wives, midwives and mothers. I conclude by arguing that such a host of eclectic tones can effectively bring other stories, to the surface and dismantle monotonous perceptions of South Indian coolie life in Malaya. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his study of graphic memoirs, Andrew Kunka discusses some of the problems of classifying autobiographical comics because the genre includes text and drawn images. He argues that 'representing events in comics form seem more overtly subjective because stylistic representations are so clearly idiosyncratic to the artist involved' (60). In this paper, I look at two comics artists who use very different styles to represent their subjective experiences of belonging and non-belonging as Asians in the North American diaspora. In the narratives of Victoria Ying and Emmanuelle Chateauneuf, typical immigrant issues, such as exclusion, isolation, and the desire for social acceptance, are represented in light, humorous, and cartoonish ways. Even though their styles are reminiscent of children's book illustrations, their narratives raise some important and serious, at times disquieting, issues including racism, anti-Asian hate, microaggressions, and discrimination. Their comics are not strict memoirs, but they create an illusion of authenticity through the use of particular objects or colours, shifts from the real to fantasy, and through the focalization on the female narrator. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

IN 2001, a young Argentinian reporter organised a meeting with a union official named Casimiro Huanca, friend and advisor to Bolivian guerrilla leader Evo Morales. It would take the reporter 24 hours to get to their meeting place in Cochabamba, Central Bolivia, through the dangerous depths of the jungle. Reporting for Clarín, the largest newspaper in Buenos Aires at the time, reporter Pablo Calvi did not make it to the meet in Cochabamba. Huanca did and was gunned down on the spot. Calvi did not write the story in 2001. And for 16 years, barely spoke of it, haunted by the belief that he was responsible for this man's death. In 2016, he returned to Bolivia to find answers, publishing them in online magazine Guernica. Through narrative inquiry and textual analysis, this paper unpacks the story's trauma frame through characterisation and structure. It focuses on the subtle use of the first person, arguing that it is an exemplar of narrative placement. This paper discusses the setting of the piece of writing as a slice of trauma memoir in postgraduate and undergraduate creative nonfiction classes, in a bid to demonstrate judicious use of first-person narration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper has two complementary objectives. After providing some theoretical perspectives on fiction generally, and on the teaching of fiction more specifically, it firstly evaluates, from a literary-critical perspective, a reasonably representative selection of the portrayal of teachers and teaching in some twentieth-century Anglo-Irish fiction and memoir. That initial, literary-critical evaluation of the texts, while focusing on aspects of both form and theme, seeks also to uncover the fascinating spectrum of models of teaching represented, some benign, but many quite dark and even, to a degree, sinister. The second half of the paper then suggests a range of pedagogical strategies which could be used, in the sixth-form classroom, to explore the richness and complexities of those portraits and of the contexts against which they are written. That in-depth pedagogical exploration is closely informed by the specifications for AS and A-level English teaching provided by two representative Examination Boards – the Council for Curriculum Examinations and Assessment (CCEA), which is based in Northern Ireland, and the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance (AQA) – and the exploration thus is linked closely to the demands and contexts for sixth-form English teaching both in Northern Ireland and in the UK as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Simpson's memoir Understory: A Life with Trees illustrates significant changes in life writing that align it with transmodernity and its turn to the relational. They become apparent when reading Understory alongside Édouard Glissant's distinction between root identity and relation identity. In generic terms, the memoir confirms the growing openness to different conventions, in this case those of the botany treatise and the nature essay. Moreover, the work expands limits on a thematic level by foregrounding Simpson's affinity with trees, a true map of her story of living in a forest in Queensland for ten years. With this other-than-human perspective, Simpson reveals the interpenetration between the two types of identity theorised by Glissant, opting for a complex relational view that does not rule out roots. This paper argues that Simpson has made a number of important discoveries: 1. trees are at the same time rooted and relational; 2. her form of environmental activism requires readjustment; 3. she needs to undo the latinising of botany terms and learn the Indigenous names of trees before she can learn the language of the forest; 4. human exceptionalism and anthropocentrism have to be put in perspective; and 5. lone trees grow taller but die younger. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the concept of translation as a lucky discovery and its transformative effects on readers, translators, and writers. It explores how translation can lead to surprising and unexpected readings, opening up new ideas and understandings. The article emphasizes the personal and spiritual aspects of translation and its potential to help writers overcome creative blocks. It also highlights the importance of exploring these rare and impactful translation experiences that challenge our thinking. The text is a collection of conversations and papers that delve into various perspectives on translation, including the collaboration between translator and author, the ecological nature of translation, the relationship between translation and identity, and the role of translation in daily life. The authors stress the significance of translation in representing diverse experiences and fostering understanding between cultures. The collection also includes personal reflections on translation and its impact on individuals and societies. Overall, it showcases the transformative and enriching power of translation. [Extracted from the article]

In the twilight of and right after World War II millions of Germans were expelled from areas initially called the Recovered Territories, and later – the Western and Northern Lands in Poland. This article focuses on the property left behind by Germans. It investigates the experiences of the Poles who directly and actively took part in the practices of appropriation of German objects. The analysis is based on memoirs submitted to the contest for diaries by settlers in the Recovered Territories that was organised by the Western Institute in Poznań in December 1956. Through the analysis of the testimonies, this paper aims to explore the constellation of meanings attributed to taking over of German property by actors who directly participated in those practices, and the meanings according to which looting functioned in daily experience after the war. It argues that the internal resistance against loot is weaker than against ordinary theft because the objects are taken out of the context of the social relations in which they functioned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Resilient autobiography emphasizes the relational aspect of life writing, drawing on human relationships that have added to the adversity in life recounted, but also builds on human connections that have encouraged and enabled survival. This paper examines resilience in Clemantine Wamariya and Elizabeth Weil's The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After, which recounts Wamariya's experiences of fleeing the Rwandan genocide. The other text considered is Abdi Nor Iftin and Max Alexander's Call Me American: A Memoir, which depicts Iftin's life in Somalia during the 1990s and relocation to Kenya and then the USA. The two autobiographical texts present resilience not only as survival but as embodied within the memoirs through the selves presented in the narratives. Resilience emerges as endurance in the face of hardship and suffering, and as a counterforce in various relational contexts, to traumatic personal and collective pasts. Both memoirs exemplify the devastating effects of war, displacement and personal loss, where trauma becomes entrenched in efforts made for survival. The attempt to reorder and repossess trauma can also be seen as an act of resilience. The personal narrative is interpreted and put into writing from the perspective of the person whose life is in focus but also through the eyes of an external observer. The life recounted can therefore be seen as both autobiographically and biographically produced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to unpack some of the dominant understandings of memory, identity and difference in intercultural lifewriting. The paper draws from my research in embodied lifewriting and narratives of resistance in marginalised women’s lives, and the works of Trinh T. Minh-ha and Karen Barad to unpack, unsettle and reconceptualise the notions of memory, identity, hybridity and difference in intercultural lifewriting. I am particularly interested in how the métissage of embodied, mythological and diffractive narratives function as an important feminist research methodology. The paper is framed within contemporary materialist feminist thinking and gestures towards an ontological and epistemological shift in the reconceptualisation of identity and difference that underpins how we craft and read intercultural lifewriting. Implicit in the hybridised process of storymaking is the interweaving of memory, imagination, identity, gender, race, history and culture. Memory, in this sense, becomes a loose and messy network of multiple strands that continually interweave, thread and hold the tapestry of storytelling and storymaking together. If personal stories are to be powerful tools for agency and resistance through the re-scripting of dominant cultural themes and identities, then we need to examine the many different ways a story can be told and retold. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, we discuss three cross-cultural memoirs used in three different university courses that introduced students to the complex identities that form both inside and outside of language classrooms. In arguing for the value of using such memoirs as content in university courses, we provide a detailed thematic analysis of Peter Hessler's River Town; Elaine Mar's Paper Daughter; and Binyavanga Wainaina's One Day I Will Write about This Place, and evaluate classroom activities and assignments that drew on these memoirs. Specifically, we highlight how reading them allowed students to understand fundamental themes in language learning and teaching and multiple ideological, institutional, and social levels of influence. Drawing on these frameworks, we make a case for employing cross-cultural memoirs to wrestle with the complexities inherent in teaching and learning English in courses across the curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Elizabeth Hamilton (1758–1816) has not so far been considered a philosopher, probably because she wrote novels and tracts on education rather than philosophical treatises. This paper argues that Hamilton's novel Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800) should be read as a philosophical text, both for its close engagement with William Godwin's moral theory and for what it suggests about Hamilton's own moral theory and moral psychology. Studies of Memoirs have so far either characterized it as merely satire of Godwin, or, if they have read it as containing arguments against Godwin's views, have described those arguments in very broad strokes, without looking closely at the text to see if the descriptions are warranted. A careful examination of Memoirs shows that Hamilton objected primarily to one key aspect of Godwin's moral theory, namely, his insistence that actions affecting others must be based on an impartial, disinterested assessment of a person's contribution to general utility rather than on their particular relationship to the agent. Memoirs also points towards Hamilton's own moral theory, as exemplified in her Series of Popular Essays (1813), with its emphasis on 'benevolent affections' that are directed towards family members and people in the agent's social circle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on a ghost story originally published in 1861 and then incorporated into a memoir published in 1887–9 by the Hungarian woman writer and editor Mária Csapó (1828–96), better known as Mrs Vachott. With the examination of the ghost story's changing publications, the paper clarifies the process during which this apparently independent ghost story became a powerful metaphor for Mrs Vachott's strenuous life with haunting memories, as recorded in her published memoir. It appears that this same ghost story had been influenced by a Hungarian translation of Walter Scott's "The Tapestried Chamber" (1829) that Mrs Vachott read in a collection of short stories issued in 1836. Thus, the successful combination of the two narratives, the ghost story and the memoir, not only makes Mrs Vachott's experiment truly remarkable, but also gives valuable insights into Scott's influence on nineteenth-century Hungarian women's writing, and into the changing possibilities of the ever hybrid form of the Gothic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I follow trails in the memory of work by reading the books and papers of Jeanne Bouvier, a French seamstress, ardent trade-unionist and passionate writer, who left a rich body of labour literature including four published historical studies, as well as the memoirs of her life, work and struggles. Work, action and creativity are three interrelated planes on which Bouvier situates herself, while memory and imagination are interwoven in the way she seeks to understand herself in the world with others. What emerges as a particularly striking theme from Bouvier's papers is a material matrix of mnemonic and imaginary practices, wherein bodies, places and objects are entangled in the narrative constitution of the self of the woman worker/writer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay presents the previously unpublished ‘Memoirs’ of Florence Hall, an African-born woman enslaved in early nineteenth-century Jamaica. The brief text describes Hall's childhood in Igboland (now southeastern Nigeria), her enslavement and journey to the Atlantic coast, her experience of the Middle Passage, and her arrival in Jamaica. There, the narrative abruptly cuts off. Evidently, the pages containing the rest of her story were lost. The text was likely written in the early nineteenth century, mediated by planter Robert Johnston, in whose papers the surviving text was found. As one of the only slave trade narratives from an African woman anywhere in the Americas, Hall's ‘Memoirs’ offer a rare opportunity to consider the transatlantic slave trade at its peak from the viewpoint of a female captive. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Muriel Dimen penned many introductions to books and panels. In this essay that became the first chapter of Reading with Muriel Dimen/Writing with Muriel Dimen: Experiments in Theorizing a Field, I follow Dimen's manner of hopscotching among self-reflection, mentoring, and theory building. I riff on Dimen's call for a new genre of psychoanalytic text and read Dimen's 1986 memoir/novel, Surviving Sexual Contradictions, finding Dimen fomenting revolution on the page as in the consulting room, where paradox and contradiction spark innovation in personal, interpersonal, and professional space. I challenge the genre of editor's introduction to put personal narrative to political task (here, the story of my decision to shift the focus of this volume from collected works to collective writing). I place Dimen in conversation with authors whose lens trained on race during the years she pursued gender. In the vulnerability that Dimen bravely forded as she turned to the study of sexual boundary violations in her late work, I find permission to call for psychoanalytic publishing to go tilt-o-whirl in service of revolution in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In line with the governing idea inspired by Octavio Getino, Fernando Solanas and Laura Mulvey – that the media technologies available for production are capable of inducing social change and artistic creativity alike – this paper focuses on the conceptualisation and representation of lightweight camera technology in a communist-era Romanian context (and a somewhat diasporically interrelated Hungarian one). According to the main argument advanced, this technological and cultural phenomenon allowed for the emergence of such ideas and mentalities and, ultimately, works of art and authorial profiles that may adequately be categorised within the thematic issue's concept of 'cultures of dissent'. In developing the argumentation three different sets of data were analysed: oral historical sources (including original ones), archival printed material, and fiction films from the examined period. Thus, memoirs of and/or structured life-path interviews with film director Lucian Pintilie as well as cinematographer-directors István Fischer and Iosif Demian – the latter with lesser known, but in many respects similar experiences of dissidence – are cross-examined with the artistic meta-representation of lightweight film and television technologies in 'dissident' fiction films: Lucian Pintilie's 1968 Reconstituirea/Reconstruction, István Fischer's 1971 Legalább Európát!/Europe at Least! and Iosif Demian's 1980 O lacrimă de fată/A Maiden's Tear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Believing that they had interesting stories to tell, Celeste Callahan and Dottie Dorion set out in 2013 to write a dual memoir that documented the expansion of their sporting experiences as American women who had grown up, studied, and started families before the passing of Title IX. Much can be learned from the resultant memoir manuscripts. By considering the processes of selective remembering and forgetting apparent in the memoirs, this paper positions the memoirs as constructed narratives. What they had to share neither represented a celebration of change nor stories that might be summed up tritely in terms of empowerment. Instead, this paper proposes that the original memoir manuscripts authored by Celeste Callahan and Dottie Dorion provide evidence that change in women's sports in the second half of the twentieth century resulted, at least in part, from a vast array of personal choices and actions, negotiated, and pursued with determination every day. For Dorion and Callahan, the inevitability of change and its permanence were not guaranteed and the memoirs themselves might be viewed as an expression of their continued commitment to the long-term goal of sporting equality for women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analysing watermark sequences in early modern manuscripts makes it possible to identify, without disturbing the binding, points at which leaves have probably been removed. Applied to Nottingham City Museum and Galleries NCM 1922–71 (previously Nottinghamshire Archives MS DD/HU/4), the autograph manuscript containing Lucy Hutchinson's famous biography of her husband John, this technique uncovers five instances in which it seems likely that Hutchinson herself intervened in this way. I discuss possible reasons for Hutchinson's removal of the leaves in question, explain the basis for this kind of watermark analysis, and highlight the importance of physical study of the manuscript to an understanding of the contexts and purposes of the Memoirs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shifting worlds, shaping fieldwork: A memoir of anthropology and art: by Susan Ossman, London & New York, Routledge, 2021, xx + 172 pp., £19.99/$26.36 (softcover), ISBN 978-1-350-12809-5 We also see how art, in Ossman's hands, becomes a way of doing "fieldwork on scholarship" (6): Ossman's exhibits become collaborative sites that realise art's potential to generate cross-cultural conversations on issues ranging from gendered forms of labour to migration and displacement. The storyline of the book moves between Susan Ossman's art and her anthropology, treating the reader to moving accounts of scholarly and artistic co-creation. [Extracted from the article]

Copyright of Social & Cultural Geography is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper builds on contemporary memoirs of homelessness from cities across the United States to develop a more nuanced understanding of the use value of urban parks and green spaces. Based on analysis of over seventy memoirs, we synthesize the writings of nine memoirists who examine their relationship to green spaces in cities. Instead of framing nature as something pristine and distinct from society—or something dangerous and untamed—these writings portray urban green spaces as sites of belonging and everyday life. In the US today, cities often either value parks as playgrounds for middle-class leisure or devalue them as targets of racialized anti-homeless policing. In both instances, parks are framed in relation to their impact on the exchange value of surrounding urban areas. In contrast, the memoirs of homelessness we examine portray parks and other green spaces as enabling privacy, survival, and emotional solace in an urban landscape often marked by surveillance, deprivation, and violence. These crucial values reveal a new conceptualization of urban parks as profoundly useful to those who are subject to the exclusions of capitalist property. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the interactive quality of memories and how they lived on in the dataset of a two-year study conducted several years ago, in which a group of women engaged in close reading and memoir-writing practices, unpacking their personal memories to gain insight into their lived experiences. In the process of analysing the data from the study, the researcher realised that the data resisted reductive interpretation and categorisation. Despite the differences between the researcher and the participants in relation to socio-cultural backgrounds and life experiences, the data from the seemingly distant worlds, was both 'alive' and interacted with her across time. The researcher found that she shared memories with the participants which evoked a strong reaction within her. These shared memories set her on a path of becoming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the process and outcome of a collaborative life writing project about the death of a parent. Aiming to discover whether collaborative creative nonfiction writing can broaden the representation of experiences of grief and address some of the ethical challenges of writing about vulnerable others, we draw on the scholarship on memoir writing and collaboration and analyse our own process and challenges against this literature. We also identify some of the benefits of collaboratively writing about a recent and personal grief. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts a rememory of the personhood and politics of Malawi's foremost leader, nationalist and dictator, Dr Hastings Kamuzu Banda, who ruled Malawi for three decades, from 1964 to 1994. The study is necessitated by the avalanche of critiques in Malawian literature which testify to the fact that for more than two decades after Banda's reign, Malawi and its politics continue to be haunted by the ghosts of the Banda dictatorship. The study adopts the postcolonial memory methodologies, alongside Toni Morrison's concept of re-memory, to palimpsestically retrieve the zeitgeist of the Banda days as detained in Mapanje's And Crocodiles are Hungry at Night. The analysis of the memoir reconstructs the various dimensions of dictatorial tendencies and traits that characterised Malawian politics and social life. These traits include arbitrary arrest and detention of perceived political enemies, the proscription of the press and creative outputs through the Censorship Board and extra-judicial killings. These recollections are meant to serve as a precautionary measure to preclude the gradual rise of neo-dictatorship in post-Banda Malawi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following paper was given at the MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: LIFE WORK AND LEGACY conference held on 8 March 2017 to celebrate International Women's Day. It was hosted by the Centre for Gender Studies of the University of Hull as part of the Hull City of Culture 2017 programme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the nexus between creative and critical thinking in the making of original work as it relates to what Susan Sontag calls ‘an ethics of seeing’. In particular, it examines a way of expressing this thinking in terms of grammar and method (syntax, vocabulary, drawing, inventory, cartography), and how the structure or genre of the work emerges from, or out of the act of writing, both criticallyandcreatively. ‘Parsing an Ethics of Seeing’ posits and presents possible approaches where the form of writing is in keeping with subject matter, in this case, an interrogation of absence and presence as poetic response in concert with what Roland Barthes calls ‘that-has-been’. It begins with the tongue and a drawing of a mother in ICU as referenced in the novel-cum-memoirBite Your Tongueand ends with photographs of a father's body the day before he dies, which forms part of a ‘mer-mer’ or memoir-in-progress. Through language and grammar, theto and froof sound and silence as Hélène Cixous thinks of it, and in a digressive and circumambulatory manner, this paper probes ‘what to look at’ and ‘how to think’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Oil evokes a range of emotions, from the promise of prosperity to the reality of environmental degradation and corporate greed. A growing number of graphic narratives (such as Gasoline Dreams) are exploring the 'cruel optimism,' to use Lauren Berlant's term, of oil. Crude: A Memoir is one such graphic narrative that through the memories of Pablo Fajardo exposes the intricate networks of extraction, the paraphernalia of the corporation-state nexus, and the contradictions of petromodernity through the use of visual storytelling techniques such as point of view, focalisation, and colour palette. This graphic narrative solicits an empathetic response from its readers by revealing the ethical and affective aspects of this environmental disaster. Drawing insights from energy humanities and comics studies, this article, through the close reading of Crude: A Memoir, investigates the toxicities of oil-modernity, the role of state infrastructure, and the global matrixes of power. Put together, Crude performs a kind of grassroot justice in that the memoir names the abusers who seem to be immune to justice, shows the plight of the Indigenous 'collateral damage' and the environmental degradation that result when legal protections are not afforded to those most vulnerable (including human, plant, animal, water, and mineral entities). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The everyday handling of objects is an often-overlooked aspect of an English country house servant's duties. However, the care of precious objects is occasionally recorded in servants' memoirs, turning them into literary sites of personal and even cultural memory. In his 1956 memoir, Of Carriages and Kings, footman Frederick Gorst recounts his time in a country house near Liverpool in the late 1890s, where he worked for Richard and Walter Gladstone, nephews to the former prime minister William Gladstone. In an astonishingly rich descriptive passage, Gorst relays the provenance of a gold and silver vase that was gifted to Robertson Gladstone (elder brother of the PM) and was a relic of the family's uncomfortable history of slave ownership in the West Indies. Adopting Elaine Freedgood's 'collector's approach', this paper examines questions of provenance, origin and connection of the vase described in Gorst's account. This process unearths conflicting information between the historical record and Gorst's account of the Gladstones' involvement in abolition. Conflicting versions of history raise the possibility of deliberate elision, corrupt group memory, and nostalgia for empire and the country house within Gorst's writing. While it is, at times, a frustratingly incomplete account, it can be read in terms of its belonging to a nostalgia-driven memoir in which empire and the country house intersect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In her graphic memoir, Marbles (2012), Ellen Forney reconciles her dual identities as an artist who takes risks and promotes change and as a person living with bipolar disorder who seeks (and occasionally resists) stability. This paper analyses how Forney uses particular narrative and optical devices to establish an idea of identities 'in company,' to destabilise stigmas around mental illness, and to invite new understandings of what 'closure' means in terms of both the phenomenology of reading comics and illness narratives more broadly. The text presents a model of living with disability as an ongoing act of actively balancing dimensions of one's identity as distinct, perpetually present, and in relation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In May 1830, a previously unknown Ulster merchant left Derry on a ship bound for Canada. In this paper I identify him as David Blair Little. Of a prominent merchant family, Little was educated and well-read, a characteristic of those who left Ireland prior to the 'Great Famine'. This article analyses his self-positioning in relation to other Irish migrants in Canada and the self-differentiating strategies employed in his memoir. The article also disentangles Little's engagement with and borrowings from popular travel accounts of the Canadas and considers their influences on his experiences. His engagement with contemporary literature and popular science illuminates the intellectual life of the middling-sort merchant class in Ulster in the first part of the nineteenth century, an important constituency of the pre-Famine Irish migrant population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Australian Journal of Political Science is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

On 16th June 1945 Ralph Aron, an eighteen-year-old German Jew from Recklinghausen, left Theresienstadt and returned home. Before he had even thought about his own future, he decided to record what had happened to him during the Holocaust. In 1995, two years before his death, Aron again recorded his experiences - this time with more reflection and a developed sense of having processed his experiences and survival. My paper compares these two memoirs by my late father, investigating the differences between his perceptions in 1945 and his deep memories of 1995. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]