AustLit

'Life Writing’s choice to feature twenty-first century autoethnography offers interpretive, analytic, interactive, performative, experiential, and embodied forms of constructed self and culture in writing around the globe. It captures a broad range of autobiographical and anthropological intersections shared from Australia, Canada, China, Egypt, Turkey, and the USA in two parts. This first issue ‘Autoethnography and Beyond: Colonialism, Immigration, Embodiment, and Belonging,’ gathers recent applications of autoethnography as a decolonising and dehegemonising practice in the allegedly post-racial, post-colonial, and post-(hetero)sexist twenty-first century. Derived from colonial populations in which peoples have been systematically denied by modern anthropology the ability to record their experiences and explore the subjectivities, in their own voices, autoethnographic practices referred to as ‘native ethnography’ emerged as a post-colonial practice enabling subjects to engage with their representers on their own terms (Pratt 1992, 7). The continued expansion of autoethnography’s applications in the twentieth century showed ethnographers’ first efforts to acknowledge their presence as narrators of their fieldwork accounts. Deemed ‘autobiographical ethnography,’ the hybrid genre gave way to cultural anthropologists’ experimentation with interjecting self-exploration into their ethnographic writing (Reed-Danahay 1997, 2). Tracts of detailed ‘thick description’ in which they narrated their observations of their subjects’ cultures gave way to mutually biographical cultural explication in which the interpretive and experiential lens of the narrative of the anthropologist’s subjectivity became more transparent (Geertz 1973, 15). This new form reframed the authority of the ethnographer’s knowledge as second to that of the populations their representations had marginalised and took the first steps toward acknowledging the ideological hegemony of anthropologists ‘speaking for’ their subjects of investigation. In this issue, the innovative forms of resistance to dominant forms of representation include critiques of the academic job market, caregiving, parenthood, and museum curation where this issue’s contributors problematise the paradigms of insider/outsider, work/family, and spectacle/spectator with critically self-reflective accounts of our human condition in its embodiment and need for belonging.' (Editorial introduction)

'In Essayism, his 2017 critical lyrical essay (inevitably) on the essay as genre, Brian Dillon opens with a kind of textual performance: a teeming list of examples, oblique references to unnamed essayists, a litany of topics and a profusion of content, discursive, paratactic and contradictory. This performs, Dillon observes, something of the effect that the term ‘essay’ denotes: ‘Imagine a type of writing so hard to define that its very name should be something like: an effort, an attempt, a trial’ (2017, 12). Essays can be partial and contingent, doubtful or incomplete and these qualities are values. ‘What holds these tendencies together? Classically, we say it is the writing “I” ' (Dillon 2017, 18).' (Kylie Cardell : Essays in Life Writing, Introduction)

'Experimentation and theorising on forms of life writing from the field of history has grown substantially in recent decades, as historians understand how autobiographical narrative may contribute to understanding both the past and our processes of accessing it. The introduction to this special issue on ‘History and Autobiography’ outlines some theoretical debates emerging from the intersection of history with different forms of self-representation, and highlights some of the main points examined by the contributors. Some contributors explore the convergence of history and life writing through an autobiographical voice, while others work theoretically or critically. Beyond these different approaches, all the essays explore to what extent autobiography serves historical writing and comprehension, and examine the theoretical and practical consequences of this convergence.'  (Jaume Aurell & Rocio G. Davis, Publication abstract)

As Penelope Lively puts it in her memoir Ammonites and Leaping Fish: A Life in Time: ‘One of the few advantages of age is that you can report on it with a certain authority; you are a native now, and know what goes on here’ Lively is part of a growing number of women writers and artists who are not only productive in their later years but who provide valuable accounts both fictional and autobiographical -of their own ageing. They follow in the footsteps of writers such as Simone de Beauvoir,  Susan Sontag, Germaine Greer, Betty Friedan, Lynne Segal and Ashton Applewhite, motivated to write about their ageing by their need to bridge the gap between the lived experiences of growing older and the dominant cultural narrative of ‘old age’ as a negative thing to be avoided and disguised. This negotiation is especially pertinent with regard to women, who, to this day, face ‘a double standard of ageing’ and for whom ‘aging casts its shadow earlier than for men’ . In view of the limited positive role models for ageing women, the desire to communicate one’s own authoritative report from the unknown territory of old age is shared by older women from all walks of life and there is an increasing need to have their diverse voices heard and acknowledged. Therefore, the focus of this special issue is on the ways older women’s life narrative redefines culturally imposed conceptions of what it means to get older. Drawing on research from cultural gerontology and critical age studies, the authors acknowledge, explore and contextualise women’s experiences of getting older, thus counterbalancing the mainly one-sided, negative representations of ageing as perpetuated by dominant cultural discourse. In doing so, they focus on diverse forms of life writing including memoirs and (auto)biography, digital and visual forms of life narrative as well as autoethnographic accounts.' (Margaret O’Neill & Michaela Schrage-Früh : Introduction)

'Life Writing would like to record our appreciation and thanks for the work of Dr Rachel Robertson, who is stepping down from her editorial role. Rachel was Associate Editor from 2013 to 2015 and Reflections Editor from 2015 to the present. We have benefitted hugely from her expertise and judgement in the field of reflective memoir. Her own memoir, Reaching One Thousand (‘a deeply enriching book’ - The Age), was shortlisted for the 2013 National Biography Award. We hope Rachel will go on keeping a friendly eye on the journal's work as she takes up a position on the editorial board.

'At the same time we welcome Dr Kylie Cardell as Life Writing's new Reflections Editor. Kylie was recently a guest editor (together with Professor Kate Douglas) of the journal's December 2017 issue. That edition (‘Locating Lives’) resulted from the important inaugural Regional IABA Conference, which launched the International Auto/Biography Association's Asia-Pacific chapter. We look forward to Kylie's influence on the journal's future development.'

(Editorial)

'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)

'As my co-editor Maria Takolander writes elsewhere in this collection, ‘Life writing has long been theorised in terms of its limits’. Indeed, one might say that a concern with limits brought the field of life-writing studies into being. The rise of auto/biography studies (the forerunner of life-writing studies) in the 1970s and 80s was in large part a concern with the generic and disciplinary limits of what constituted both auto/biography and ‘Literature’. This was despite Paul de Man’s warning that attempts to define autobiography in terms of genre ‘seem to founder in questions that are both pointless and unanswerable’ (919). Philippe Lejeune sought to circumvent such definitional problems by attending to autobiography as a mode of reading, and (famously) understood the relationship between autobiographer and reader as a ‘pact’ (a formal agreement of limitations). Lejeune’s legal metaphor and structuralist approach, though, was far from reductive. His conclusion that autobiography is a ‘historically variable contractual effect’ (30) effectively draws attention to the limits of proposing limits.'  (Editorial introduction)

'The new, recently re-designed Taylor and Francis website has added much to user-friendliness for journal readers and submitting authors. But this edition of Life Writing has made me realise that in leaving the old format behind we have lost a useful feature—the ability to quickly scan the list of contributors and get a sense of the overall ‘balance’ of where our articles are coming from. In a globalised world this may seem irrelevant, but I'm sure I'm not alone in having an interest in the geographical, linguistic and cultural context in which our authors write.' (Editorial introduction)