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Tami Spry provides a methodological introduction to the budding field of performative autoethnography. She intertwines three necessary elements comprising the process. First one must understand the body – navigating concepts of self, culture, language, class, race, gender, and physicality. The second task is to put that body on the page, assigning words for that body's sociocultural experiences. Finally, this merger of body and paper is lifted up to the stage, crafting a persona as a method of personal inquiry. These three stages are simultaneous and interdependent, and only in cultivating all three does performance autoethnography begin to take shape. Replete with examples and exercises, this is an important introductory work for autoethnographers and performance artists alike.

In this absorbing collection of papers Aboriginal, Maori, Dalit and western scholars discuss and analyse the difficulties they have faced in writing Indigenous biographies and autobiographies. The issues range from balancing the demands of western and non-western scholarship, through writing about a family that refuses to acknowledge its identity, to considering a community demand not to write anything at all.The collection also presents some state-of-the-art issues in teaching Indigenous Studies based on auto/biography in Austria, Spain and Italy.

Dositej Obradović’s Život i priključenija is generally considered the symbolic herald of modern Serbian literature, a paradigmatic text which affected many later writers, including Gerasim Zelić. The paper compares Dositej’s work and Zelić’s Žitije focusing on three levels: firstly, it tracks the common topoi and the distinctive characteristics of the two texts; secondly, it discusses the ways in which Zelić reinterprets Dositej’s model, especially with respect to autobiography and travelogue; finally, it elaborates on the different yet cognate notion of authorship the two texts propose.

Between the 18th and 19th centuries adventurism became a staple part of the bourgeois ideology of material acquisition. The paper focuses on Gerasim Zelić’s Žitije, signalling how it is filled with descriptions of the struggle to reach an important social position and obtain material gain. Nevertheless, Zelić cannot be compared with contemporary adventurers, as he combines the aspiration of the Enlightenment with a strong faith in the concept of predestination, on one side, and the struggle to obtain personal gain with a strong commitment towards the common good, on the other.

While travelling across Europe, the enlightened Orthodox monk Gerasim Zelić mentally never abandons his native Dalmatia. Moving from his Žitije, which is essentially a travelogue, the paper aims to analyse the tension between the open-minded, secular Zelić and the other Zelić, who identified himself with the Orthodox traditions of Dalmatia without knowing how to adjust them to modernity. According to the author, his rational head and his romantic heart make his global outlook deeply controversial and his mentality typical of a Homo Mediterraneus.

The most challenging aspect of narrative research is to find and select stories that go beyond'a good story'to some kind of wider, theoretical meaning or implication. How can we know what is good work in narrative research if there are no methodological commandments? How can nonlinear concepts, such as persuasiveness, credibility, and insightfulness be measured? Exploring these provocative questions, the contributors to this volume examine such issues as the various guides to doing qualitative research, how scholars from two different disciplines (psychology and literature) respond to an analysis of several autobiographies that were published and analyzed by a third scholar, how to make meaning of narrative interviews by considering the problem of interpreting what is not said, how cultural meanings and values (particularly about gender) are transmitted across generations, the transformational power of stories within social organizations and the use of these stories as an agent of change, and more. The papers in this volume come from five countries (United States, Finland, Holland, Israel, and England) and five disciplines (criminology, literature studies, nursing, psychology, and sociology). These chapters will spur and support the quest for understanding through narrative and reflect the many ways to approach this type of research.

The papers in this volume show the presence of Gottfried Keller, the literary father figure of Swiss literature, in the texts of the Swiss authors from 1960ies, such as Otto F. Walter, Hugo Loetscher, Adolf Muschg, and Urs Widmer. Although these authors work in the democratic tradition of Switzerland and have an almost identificatory relationship to Keller, their role in the changed political life of the 20th century is completely different from that of their great literary model. The volume also contains studies on other Swiss literary classics, such as Robert Walser and Meinrad Inglin, as well as later authors, such as Max Frisch and Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Erica Pedretti, Thomas Hürlimann, Silvio Blatter, Peter Stamm, and Gertrud Leutenegger., In den in diesem Band zusammengetragenen Beiträgen wird die Präsenz des literarischen Übervaters der Schweizer Literatur, Gottfried Kellers, bei Autoren der 1960er Jahre wie Otto F. Walter, Hugo Loetscher, Adolf Muschg und Urs Widmer gezeigt. Diese engagierten Autoren, die sich zwar in die demokratische Tradition der Schweiz stellen und zu Keller in ein fast identifikatorisches Verhältnis treten, spielen anlässlich der veränderten politischen Öffentlichkeit im 20. Jahrhundert jedoch eine entschieden andere Rolle als ihr großes literarisches Vorbild. Aus der Sicht der Tradition und der Moderne werden im Hinblick auf die Schriftform und das Autobiographische sowie auf die Dorfwirklichkeit und die Karnevalisierung der Literatur die poetischen Auffassungen von zwei anderen Klassikern der Schweizer Literatur, von Robert Walser und Meinrad Inglin, in den Mittelpunkt der Betrachtungen und Diskussionen gerückt. Mit ihren Versuchen, die prekäre Nachkriegssituation in tragikomischen Dramen zu verarbeiten, kommen die beiden großen Beobachter der Auswirkungen des Faschismus, Frisch und Dürrenmatt zur Sprache. Vorgestellt wird Dürrenmatts politisches Engagement an seiner Auseinandersetzung mit dem „Vater der Wasserstoffbombe“, Edward Teller, die bei einer Fernsehdiskussion stattgefunden hatte. Der Einbruch der Moderne in die Familie wird an Autoren wie Erica Pedretti, Thomas Hürlimann und Silvio Blatter vorgeführt. Besonderes Augenmerk gilt jüngeren Autoren und Autorinnen wie Peter Stamm oder der zu Unrecht weniger bekannten Gertrud Leutenegger.

Myths and stereotypes surrounding seafarers in the Age of Sail persist to this day. Sailors were celebrated for their courage, strength, and skill, yet condemned for militancy, vice, and fecklessness. As sail gave way to steam, sailing-ship mariners became nostalgic symbols of maritime prowess and heritage, representing a timeless, heroic masculinity in an era when the modernizing industrial world was challenging assumptions about gender, class, work, and society.Drawing on British seafaring memoirs from the late nineteenth century, Making Men in the Age of Sail argues that maritime writing moulded the reading public's image of the merchant seaman. Authors chronicled their lives as they grew from boy sailors to trained seafarers, telling colourful tales of the men they worked with – most never doubted that the sailing ship had made them better men. Their testimony reinforced and preserved conservative perspectives on seafaring manhood as Britain's economic and technological priorities continued to evolve in the new steamship age.Offering a gender analysis of the image of the seafarer, Making Men in the Age of Sail brings the history of British sailors into wider debates about modernity and masculinity.

Following the critical scepticism surrounding the notion of the ‘self'as a singular entity during the 1960s, many artists and writers sought to test the apparent problem posed by autobiography as both a traditional genre and as a way of working. Considering the consequent emergence of autotheory, Lifework traces this shift in artistic and literary production during the late twentieth century and beyond, examining a set of diverse practices that mine the line between what it is to make art and what it is to live life. The book's chapters connect a variety of artistic strategies that cut across medium, geography and time, uncovering how the historical marginalisation of first-person experience has taken on larger social, cultural and political implications in the contemporary moment and how the work of living might still relate to the work of art.

After killing her treacherous step-father, a girl tries to escape the country with a young vagabond. She dresses as a boy, they hop freight trains, quarrel with a group of hobos, and steal a car in their attempt to escape the police and reach Canada. A bestseller in 1924, in this vivid piece of outlaw history Jim Tully takes us across the seamy underbelly of pre-WWI America on freight trains, and inside hobo jungles and brothels while narrowly averting the cops. The author chose life on the road over a deadening job, through his teenage years of learning the ropes of the rails and living one meal to the next.

Helen Keller tells us about Anne Sullivan Macy, the woman who opened the world for her. Although the book was intended as a biography, it is also autobiographical in part since the lives of the author and subject were so closely intertwined for many years.

Not a chronological biography but an account of what Kahlil Gibran was about and what he believed in as told by his closest friend and personal secretary who knew him during the last seven years of his life. Includes some of his paintings and etchings and snippets of his poems and writings. Records the personal history of the Lebanese poet and painter, vividly recreating his personality and philosophy. Author of this book, Barbara Young, was an art and literary critic at the New York Times early in the 20th century, and a poet. She met Kahlil Gibran at a reading of his work The Prophet and became his personal secretary and confidante from 1925 until his death in 1931.

A user-friendly guide to reading, writing, and theorizing autobiographical texts and practices for students, scholars, and practitioners of life narrative The boom in autobiographical narratives continues apace. It now encompasses a global spectrum of texts and practices in such media as graphic memoir, auto-photography, performance and plastic arts, film and video, and online platforms. Reading Autobiography Now offers both a critical engagement with life narrative in historical perspective and a theoretical framework for interpreting texts and practices in this wide-ranging field. Hailed upon its initial publication as “the Whole Earth Catalog of autobiography studies,” this essential book has been updated, reorganized, and expanded in scope to serve as an accessible and contemporary guide for scholars, students, and practitioners. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson explore definitions of life narrative, probe issues of subjectivity, and outline salient features of autobiographical acts and practices. In this updated edition, they address emergent topics such as autotheory, autofiction, and autoethnography; expand the discussions of identity, relationality, and agency; and introduce new material on autobiographical archives and the profusion of “I”s in contemporary works. Smith and Watson also provide a helpful toolkit of strategies for reading life narrative and an extensive glossary of mini-essays analyzing key theoretical concepts and dozens of autobiographical genres. An indispensable exploration of this expansive, transnational, multimedia field, Reading Autobiography Now meticulously unpacks the heterogeneous modes of life narratives through which people tell their stories, from traditional memoirs and trauma narratives to collaborative life narrative and autobiographical comics.

From the author of funny classics like “How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes” and “The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody.” Here in “How to Be a Hermit” are humorous essays and stories discussing house cleaning, cooking, sardines, spinach, clams, lettuce, cabbage, beans, coffee, budgets, entertaining, and the holidays. Will Cuppy (1884-1949) wrote extensively on his life as a hermit, the natural world, and just about anything else that proved the world was out to get him. Think of this book like a humorous memoir by a financially-challenged book reviewer living alone in a shack on an island off Long Island, New York, in the 1920s. “How to be a Hermit” first published in 1929, now public domain, was his first bestseller. Hilarious stuff!

This volume examines a selection of life writing in English by authors from the South West Indian Ocean, namely South Africa, East Africa, Mauritius and Sri Lanka. The two motifs that run through the chapters – mourning and resilience – are theoretical frameworks that have so far not been brought into conversation in this way. The combination of trauma studies and autobiographical analysis sharpens the focus of the discussions on Indian Ocean life writing, privileging an Indian Ocean imaginary that is transnational and cross-oceanic in its orientation and pointing to networks of connections that transcend the nation state, which is often the origin of trauma in the first place. Filling a gap in Indian Ocean studies in its close readings of trauma and resilience, the book also broadens perspectives on postcolonial life writing since little attention has been paid so far to Indian Ocean autobiographical literary products. By the same token, the volume also enriches the field of Indian Ocean literary studies by incorporating life writing as an aesthetic strategy which helps to configure Indian Ocean subjectivities.

For working-class life writers in nineteenth century Britain, happiness was a multifaceted emotion: a concept that could describe experiences of hedonic pleasure, foster and deepen social relationships, drive individuals to self-improvement, and lead them to look back over their lives and evaluate whether they were well-lived. However, not all working-class autobiographers shared the same concepts or valorizations of happiness, as variables such as geography, gender, political affiliation, and social and economic mobility often influenced the way they defined and experienced their emotional lives. The Happiness of the British Working Class employs and analyzes over 350 autobiographies of individuals in England, Scotland, and Ireland to explore the sources of happiness of British working people born before 1870. Drawing from careful examinations of their personal narratives, Jamie L. Bronstein investigates the ways in which working people thought about the good life as seen through their experiences with family and friends, rewarding work, interaction with the natural world, science and creativity, political causes and religious commitments, and physical and economic struggles. Informed by the history of emotions and the philosophical and social-scientific literature on happiness, this book reflects broadly on the industrial-era working-class experience in an era of immense social and economic change.

Mary Borden worked for four years in an evacuation hospital unit following the front lines up and down the European theater of the First World War. This beautifully written book, to be read alongside the likes of Sassoon, Graves, and Remarque, is a collection of her memories and impressions of that experience. Describing the men as they march into battle, engaging imaginatively with the stories of individual soldiers, and recounting procedures at the field hospital, the author offers a perspective on the war that is both powerful and intimate.

This book explores 21st-century uses of the second- and third-person perspective in Anglophone autobiographical narratives by canonical male writers. Through detailed readings of contemporary autobiographical works by Paul Auster, Julian Barnes, J.M. Coetzee, and Salman Rushdie, the study demonstrates the multiple aesthetic, rhetorical, and un/ethical implications of the choice of narrative perspective as well as the uncommon step of articulating the self from a perspective which is not I. Drawing on (rhetorical) narratology and autobiography theory, the book engages with questions and tensions of subjectivity and relationality, the interplay of distance and proximity resulting from the narrative perspective, and its effects on the relationship between autobiographer, text, and reader. In addition, the book traces relevant guiding principles that the authors use to navigate their self-narratives in relation to others, such as questions of embodiment, visuality, grief, ethics, and politics. Situating the narratives in their socio-political and cultural context, the book uncovers to what extent these autobiographical narratives reflect the authors'position between self-withdrawal and self-promotion as well as their response to questions of male agency, self-stylisation, and celebrity status.

Today, history is increasingly written in the first person. A growing number of historical works include an autobiographical dimension, as if writing about the past required exploring the inner life of the author. Neither traditional history nor autobiography, this hybrid genre calls the norms of the historical profession into question. In search of new and creative paths, it transgresses a cardinal rule of the discipline: third-person narration, long considered necessary to the objective analysis of the past.Singular Pasts offers a critical account of the emergence of authorial subjectivity in historical writing, scrutinizing both its achievements and its shortcomings. Enzo Traverso considers a group of contemporary historians, including Ivan Jablonka, Sergio Luzzatto, and Mark Mazower, who reveal their emotional ties to their subjects and give their writing a literary flavor. He identifies a parallel trend in literature, in which authors such as W. G. Sebald, Patrick Modiano, Javier Cercas, and Daniel Mendelsohn write their works as investigations based on archival sources. Traverso argues that first-person history mirrors contemporary ways of thinking: such writing is presentist and apolitical, perceiving and representing the past through an individual lens. Probing the limits of subjective historiography, he emphasizes that it is collective action that produces social change: “we” instead of “I.” In an epilogue, Traverso considers the first-person writing of Saidiya Hartman as a counterexample. A wide-ranging and illuminating critique of a key trend in humanistic inquiry, Singular Pasts reconsiders the notion of historical truth in a neoliberal age.

This book provides researchers and teachers of different disciplines, such as literature, cultural studies, and applied linguistics, with a deeper understanding of the autobiography, both as a genre and a data collection method. The book presents a variety of forms of autobiographies produced in varied fields, including confessional poems, politicians'autobiographies, and autobiographical novels. Unique among these autobiographies are those that were produced in the field of education, namely foreign language education. The richness of the studies reported in the chapters lies in the wide variety of qualitative and quantitative analytical tools borrowed from different disciplines (mainly applied linguistics and ethnography). The book features conceptual metaphor analysis, appraisal theory, multimodality analysis, generic analysis, and content analysis.

Despite their literary and cultural significance, Afro-Latino memoirs have been marginalized in both Latino and African American studies. Trent Masiki remedies this problem by bringing critical attention to the understudied African American influences in Afro-Latino memoirs published after the advent of the Black Arts movement. Masiki argues that these memoirs expand on the meaning of racial identity for both Latinos and African Americans. Using interpretive strategies and historical methods from literary and cultural studies, Masiki shows how Afro-Latino memoir writers often turn to the African American experience as a model for articulating their Afro-Latinidad. African American literary production, expressive culture, political ideology, and religiosity shaped Afro-Latino subjectivity more profoundly than typically imagined between the post-war and post-soul eras. Masiki recovers this neglected history by exploring how and why Black nationalism shaped Afro-Latinidad in the United States. This book opens the border between the canons of Latino and African American literature, encouraging greater intercultural solidarities between Latinos and African Americans in the era of Black Lives Matter.

This memoir of one man's coming-of-age through the Civil Rights movement follows his childhood innocence of white supremacy during the 50's to his awakening as a full-time organizer in the deep south, and the petrifying costs he was bound to pay. Standing serves up an authentic memoir of a young Black boy growing up in a highly segregated environment: the heart of Dallas, Texas, during the era where segregation was the law of the land. Ernest McMillan came of age within an loving family and a nurturing community, virtually shielded from the outside--rampaging tides of white supremacy and a caste system squarely based on color. Dallas is often portrayed as a city in which the Civil Rights movement bypassed, but those claims are mythical in word and deed. McMillan's emergence into manhood fighting for equal rights in the “Black Belt” South and his return to his birthplace to challenge the status quo of the white power structure brought him face to face with forces that were dead set on wiping him off the planet entirely, or imprisoning him in perpetuity.

What is an “American” identity? The tension between populism and pluralism, between homogeneity and heterogeneity, has marked the United States since its inception. In The Divided States, leading scholars and critics argue that the US is, and has always been, a site where multiple national identities intersect in productive and challenging ways. Scrutinizing conflicting nationalisms and national identities, the authors ask, Whose stories get told and whose do not? Who or what promotes the idea of a unified national identity in the United States? How is the notion of a unified national identity disrupted? What myths and stories bind the US together? How representative are these stories? What are the counternarratives? And, if the idea of national homogeneity is a fallacy, what does tie us together as a nation? Working across auto/biography studies, American studies, and human geography—all of which deal with the current interest in competing narratives, “alternative facts,” and accountability—the essays engage in and contribute to critical conversations in classrooms, scholarship, and the public sphere. The authors draw from a variety of fields, including anthropology; class analysis; critical race theory; diasporic, refugee, and immigration studies; disability studies; gender studies; graphic and comix studies; Indigenous studies; linguistics; literary studies; sociology; and visual culture. And the genres under scrutiny include diary, epistolary communication, digital narratives, graphic narratives, literary narratives, medical narratives, memoir, oral history, and testimony. This fresh and theoretically engaged volume will be relevant to anyone interested in the multiplicity of voices that make up the US national narrative.

In Speak of It, Marcos McPeek Villatoro explores how he channeled his Latino roots to come to terms with the childhood sexual abuse he suffered at the hands of a relative in his home in Appalachia, and he recounts his ensuing struggle with trauma and mental illness.The son of a Salvadoran mother and Scotch Irish mechanic father, Marcos spent much of his life trying to break away from his Southern Appalachian past and the trauma experienced there and striving to get closer to his Salvadoran heritage. His journey includes steeping himself in the Spanish language and Latin American literature, especially the work of Gabriel García Marquez; a stint in Nicaragua with Witness for Peace, followed by missionary work in Guatemala; and social-justice work with Mexican migrant farmworkers in Alabama. Each experience brought him closer to understanding where he came from and to forging an identity as a whole self in the wake of trauma.Riveting, horrifying, moving, and inspiring, Speak of It is a testament to the healing power of language, books, and identity.

A memoir by the New York Times–bestselling author and longtime chronicler of America's wealthy elite. Born in Connecticut in 1929 and educated at Williams College, Stephen Birmingham went on to create a literary niche with his numerous nonfiction works about New York's—and the nation's—upper class, particularly focusing on Jewish, African American, and Irish communities, as well as old-money WASPs. He also drew on his “intimate knowledge of the private lives of the rich and famous” to write bestselling works of fiction such as The Auerbach Will (The New York Times Book Review). In this book, Birmingham's attention is turned to his own life, both personal and professional, allowing us to learn about the man who created such compelling portraits of glittering parties, exclusive addresses, and, in some cases, rags-to-riches sagas that epitomize the American dream—and the American struggle. In the end, his story is as fascinating as those of the aristocrats he documented. “When it comes to the folkways of the rich, the powerful, and the privileged, Stephen Birmingham knows what he's talking about.” —Los Angeles Times

The third millennium confronts academics of all disciplines of study with the exigency of addressing their emergent dilemmas as professionals in their fields through scholarly publications. This volume finds an outlet for such expressiveness in autoethnography, which helps to emancipate individuals, institutions, and societies through creating authentic relations between scholars and their writing. It explores the new relationships between scholars and their writing which the worldwide context of the SarsCov2 pandemic forced into being. The contributions here describe personal experiences related to the changes in their authors'approach to work in general, and to writing in particular, with an eye to how they may shed light upon the cultural and social dynamics upon the whole. The authors offer implicit criticism of the newly constructed social reality.

The collected writing of one of Australia's most admired authors and journalists, Les Carlyon.'Les Carlyon has died, and Australia has lost one of its greatest wordsmiths.'Greg Baum, The Age'He's been called Australia's Damon Runyon, but that tag is far too limiting to do him justice. Certainly his turf stories are usually character-driven gems. But read him on Anzac Cove, or Bradman, or Ted Whitten, or any part of the essence of this country. He writes with gritty elegance.'Harry GordonLes Carlyon was one of Australia's greatest journalists and writers. His career in newspapers was stellar - he became editor of The Age at 33, and went on to become editor in chief of The Herald & Weekly Times. But he was always much more about the written word than about management, winning two Walkley Awards and the coveted Graham Perkin Journalist of the Year Award in a career where he covered everything from politics to horse racing. Yet most Australians will know him as an author, writing books that gave us the very essence of our history and our culture - as though he was in the trenches of the Western Front, or in the betting ring at Flemington. His epic account of the first ANZAC campaign, Gallipoli (2001), was truly ground-breaking, combining incredible research and an ability to capture the human essence with a style that was distinctively his own. Gallipoli went on to become an international bestseller, and his sequel, The Great War (2006), won the Prime Minister's Prize for Australian History, and was the 2007 Australian Book Industry Book of the Year. The Master (2012), an intimate portrait of Bart Cummings, cemented Les's place as Australia's greatest-ever horse racing writer.From Don Bradman to Paul Keating, from Flemington to Flanders, from Henry Lawson to Clive James, A Life in Words is a collection of Les's very best writing, taken from across his career.'The collected journalism of Les Carlyon stands out for its wit and grasp of human complexity.'The Age'Just perfect … It will make you miss him all over again.'The Australian'One of the finest journalists Australia has produced. Carlyon's writing is rich, varied and highly entertaining.'The Herald Sun

An inspiring memoir of resilience by a young survivor of the war in Ukraine, as told through her diary entries—a harrowing and ultimately hopeful survival story. Yeva Skalietska's story begins on her twelfth birthday in Kharkiv, where she has been living with her grandmother since she was a baby. Ten days later, the only life she'd ever known was shattered. On February 24, 2022, her city was suddenly under attack as Russia launched its horrifying invasion of Ukraine. Yeva and her grandmother took shelter in a basement bunker, where she began writing this diary. She describes the bombings she endured while sheltering underground and her desperate journey west to escape the conflict raging around them. After many endless train rides and a prolonged stay in an overcrowded refugee center in Western Ukraine, Yeva and her beloved grandmother eventually find refuge in Ireland. There, she bravely begins to forge a new life, hoping she'll be able to return home one day. Hardcover with dust jacket; 128 pages; 7.5 in H x 5 in W.

A vida dos africanos não se limitou à escravização e à destruição de suas formas anteriores de organização social. Ultrapassada a experiência marcante da travessia do Atlântico, milhões de vidas foram reinventadas mesmo sob condições terrivelmente adversas. Novas devoções, formações familiares, línguas, novos alimentos: tudo estava por ser feito nas diferentes formas de resistência mobilizadas para a sobrevivência. E sobreviver era a maior resistência, sem mencionar que o aprendizado da narrativa da própria história em moldes compreensíveis aos interlocutores que se pretendia alcançar era uma prova inegável de vitalidade. […] O autor não se deixou intimidar pela fonte inusitada no ambiente dos historiadores profissionais no Brasil e encarou assuntos sobre os quais autores abalizados pareciam já haver dito tudo, como é o caso dos significados da liberdade para quem os construiu. Enfrentar esses desafios são a prova de maturidade intelectual que Rafael nos dá. Se essa prova serve para habilitá-lo no ofício, o livro também traz ao leitor uma escrita fina, bem construída e prazerosa. Os maus escritores que me perdoem, mas escrever bem é tarefa da qual o historiador não deve descuidar. Leitor, adentre sem medo, que o livro é bonito demais! — Jaime Rodrigues, no Prefácio

Named a Michigan Notable Book for 2023! Gold Medal Winner in the Midwest Independent Publisher Awards! Next Generation Indie Book Award Winner! Eric Hoffer Book Award Winner! Society of Midland Authors Award Winner! 2023 Arab American Book Award Winner! Hadha Baladuna ('this is our country') is the first work of creative nonfiction in the field of Arab American literature that focuses entirely on the Arab diaspora in Metro Detroit, an area with the highest concentration of Arab Americans in the US. Narratives move from a young Lebanese man in the early 1920s peddling his wares along country roads to an aspiring Iraqi-Lebanese poet who turns to the music of Tupac Shakur for inspiration. The anthology then pivots to experiences growing up Arab American in Detroit and Dearborn, capturing the cultural vibrancy of urban neighborhoods and dramatizing the complexity of what it means to be Arab, particularly from the vantage point of biracial writers. Included in these works is a fearless account of domestic and sexual abuse and a story of a woman who comes to terms with her queer identity in a community that is not entirely accepting. The anthology concludes with explorations of political activism dating back to the 1960s and Dearborn's shifting demographic landscape. Hadha Baladuna: Arab American Narratives of Boundary and Belonging contains stories of immigration and exile by following newcomers'attempts to assimilate into American society. Editors Ghassan Zeineddine, Nabeel Abraham, and Sally Howell have assembled a cast of emerging and established writers from a wide array of communities, including cultural heritages originating from Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, and Yemen. The strong pattern in Arab Detroit today is to oppose marginalization through avid participation in almost every form of American identity-making. This engaged stance is not a byproduct of culture, but a new way of thinking about the US in relation to one's homeland.

Teaching in the southern African nation of Botswana in the early 1980s, Richard Christensen faced a new world, one endlessly fascinating and challenging. Experiencing warm hospitality from many people, sharing both joyful celebrations and painful struggles with students, he and his family encountered a deeper sense of the true meaning of community. Travel in apartheid South Africa and war-weary Zimbabwe gave him a fuller understanding of the reality of oppression and how people of faith endured their plight and kept hope alive. In this experience, so surprising in many ways, he came to a deepened realization of the genuine freedom of the gospel and the hope it affords us. He saw that relationships are what save us, that the salvation of God in Christ is not merely personal and individual, but communal, and that we are thus more dependent upon one another than we realize. Learning to see the world with new eyes, he discovered not only a more expansive vision of the church and the world, but also a more honest and complete understanding of himself as a product of an affluent and segregated society.

In The Performance of Authenticity: The Makings of Jazz and the Self in Autobiography Teófilo Espada-Brignoni analyzes the autobiographies of New Orleans musicians (Baby Dodds, Sidney Bechet, Pops Foster, and Lee Collins) who throughout their texts construct New Orleans jazz as an authentic musical expression grounded in their experiences and culture. The author argues the autobiographies reproduce and reinterpret modernist conceptions of authenticity to assert and affirm authority over the public representations and discussions of jazz. Through the autobiographers'use of ideas about authenticity, they establish the value of their narratives but at the same time reinforce some of the power dynamics they set out to criticize. Their narratives also reveal the complex ethics that emerged during the first decades of the music and problematize modernist values such as individualism, the dichotomy of work and life, as well as the self and the social. The book adopts Foucauldian and social-constructivist perspectives, complementing analysis of the autobiographies by drawing from literary theory, psychology, sociology, and jazz scholarship.

Reading life writing that runs from Tracey Emin, Faith Ringgold and Judy Chicago to Marie Bashkirtseff, Benvenuto Cellini and beyond, Artists and Their Autobiographies from Today to the Renaissance and Back investigates the intriguing doubled truths of artists'autobiographies: truth in life and truth in art; authorial truth/s and the truth of their art as they saw it. However, this book focuses specifically on the truth of sincerity, which here—following classic discussions by Reindert Dhondt, Philippe Lejeune and Lionel Trilling—appears as a truth to self that floats free from facts to link avowal and feeling. From there, this volume merges autobiography studies with a history of ideas approach to art to trace sincerity's constancy and variability across times and cultures. Through this pre-disciplinary dialogue, this book shows that recent and historical artists'autobiographies differ in how, not if, they intertwine sincerity in life and art. Along the way, this volume leverages the foregrounding of sincerity caused by this doubling to explore such key issues of autobiography studies as autobiography's relation to fiction, serial autobiography,'as-told-to'narrative and what happens when liars claim to tell all.

Wie Entscheidungen autobiografiefähig werden, zeigt Sarah Alice Nienhaus in ihrer archivbasierten Studie. Autobiografien gelten als das Produkt einer spontanen Erinnerungsleistung. Doch: Der Blick in die Entstehungskontexte überrascht und destabilisiert diese wirkmächtige Vorstellung nachhaltig. Sarah Alice Nienhaus zeigt anhand materialreicher Analysen, wie Fanny Lewald-Stahr, Paul Heyse und Arthur Schnitzler die Archivwürdigkeit ihres zukünftigen Nachlasses gezielt vorbereiteten und an einer ausgeklügelten Erinnerungspolitik arbeiteten. Statt in Schreibklausur einen nostalgischen Rückblick auf Papier zu bannen, brachten sie ihr »Privatarchiv« in nachweltfähige Form. Werk- und Nachlassentscheidungen knüpften sie an lebenslaufkonstitutive Entscheidungsprozesse, indem sie bislang unter Verschluss gehaltene Schriftstücke publizierten. Dieses präventive Publikationsverfahren verweist auf archivarische, editorische sowie kuratorische Expertisen, die gemeinsam eine Professionalisierung des Schriftstellerberufs dokumentieren. Die Studie erweitert die theorieaffine Autobiografieforschung um eine praxissensible Perspektive, da sie den Erkenntniswert zwischen Autobiografie und Archiv erstmals systematisch auslotet.