AustLit

'Life Writing in the Anthropocene is a collection of timely and original approaches to the question of what constitutes a life, how that life is narrated, and what lives matter in autobiography studies in the Anthropocene. This era is characterised by the geoengineering impact of humans, which is shaping the planet’s biophysical systems through the combustion of fossil fuels, production of carbon, unprecedented population growth, and mass extinction. These developments threaten the rights of humans and other-than-humans to just and sustainable lives.

'In exploring ways of representing life in the Anthropocene, this work articulates innovative literary forms such as ecobiography (the representation of a human subject's entwinement with their environment), phytography (writing the lives of plants), and ethological poetics (the study of nonhuman poetic forms), providing scholars and writers with innovative tools to think and write about our strange new world. In particular, its recognition on plant life reminds us of how human lives are entwined with vegetal lives. The creative and critical essays in this book, shaped by a number of Antipodean authors, bear witness to a multitude of lives and deaths.

'The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies.' (Publication summary)

' A questioning about the ethics of reading and the visualization of refugees and asylum-seekers in graphic life narratives recurs throughout this issue, and necessarily so, given the urgency of scholarly work on the inhumanities of forced migration now. How do we bear “adequate witness” to graphic narratives that document the undocumented, receiving their testimony without deforming it by doubt, or substituting different terms of value than the ones offered by the witnesses themselves? The distinction between the spectator, as the detached observer, and the witness, who undertakes an ethical look that mobilizes a sense of responsibility, is critical here. Many of us have claimed that the gutters, frames, and lines of autographic art, its grammar and technology, summon ethical engagement. Comics do not merely represent; they materialize, they are productive, creating ways of seeing and feeling. As the editors of this special issue suggest in their introduction—which immediately alerts us to these questions on the ethical positioning of the artist-witness and the reader-witness—comics are an intersubjective, immersive representational form, where the reader is drawn into affective and ethical exchanges as we project meanings into the gaps and gutters on the page. But what forms does this ethical engagement take? What are the outcomes of “mobilizing responsibility” and why do these questions become urgent and personal when the subjects of autographic art are refugees, migrants, and asylum-seekers?' (Introduction)

'This essay turns to the paratexts of No Friend but the Mountains, and the question of how this book should be read in these margins of the text. Focusing on both peritexts and epitexts—Richard Flanagan’s “Foreword,” Omid Tofighian’s “Translator’s Tale” and “Reflections,” and a review of the novel by J. M. Coetzee, “Australia’s Shame”—it examines the ethical challenge to Australian readers at this threshold of interpretation, and asks what responses we might make as beneficiaries and implicated subjects, and as Southern readers.' (Publication abstract)

'Inspired by Robert Dixon's volumes on visual culture, colonial modernity and the Pacific, this article argues for a distinctive refugee imaginary in media witnessing and documentary cinema in the South, focussing on Eva Orner's 'Chasing Asylum' and two documentaries by Behrouz Boochani: 'Chauka' (with Arash Kamali Sarvestani) and 'Remain' (with Hoda Afshar).' (Publication abstract)

'Although Joe Sacco is frequently present in the frame of his comics journalism, as a witness, listener and scribe, he rarely attaches his own autobiographical experience to these representations of self. Recently some more detailed biographical detail about Joe Sacco’s own life story has begun to emerge in the frames of his comics, particularly in his work on refugees and asylum seekers. One of the least significant and little known facts about Joe Sacco’s life, his childhood as a migrant in Australia, becomes relevant here, extending his enduring commitment to ethical spectatorship, and the visibility of human rights violations, by engaging with this most difficult and intimate work of interrogating citizenship, our own and ‘others’.'  (Publication abstract)

'Postcolonial Life Narrative draws together two dynamic fields of contemporary literature and criticism, postcolonialism and life narrative, to create a new assemblage: postcolonial life narrative. Focusing in particular on testimonial narrative, from slave narrative in the late eighteenth century to contemporary Anglophone life narrative from Africa, Australia, the Caribbean, Palestine, North America, and India, this study follows texts on the move through adaptation, appropriation, and remediation. For postcolonial subjects life narrative offers extraordinary opportunities to present accounts of social injustice and oppression, of violence and social suffering. Testimonial narrative can reach across cultures to produce intimate attachments between those who testify and those who bear witness to legacies of apartheid, slavery, rape warfare, genocide, and dispossession. Thresholds of testimony are subject to change and for some, for example refugees and asylum seekers, opportunities to engage a witnessing public and inspire campaigns for social justice on their behalf are curtailed—these are the 'ends of testimony'. The production, circulation, and reception of testimonial life narrative connects directly to the most fundamental questions of who counts as human, what rights follow from this, and what makes for grievable life. Postcolonial life narrative is a dynamic field of literature and criticism, and this book presents a series of proximate readings that outline its distinctive imaginative geographies.' (Publication summary)

'These chapters gathered from two special issues of the journal Life Writing take up a major theme of recent work in the Humanities: Trauma. Autobiography has had a major role to play in this ‘age of trauma’, and these essays turn to diverse contexts that have received little attention to date: partition narratives in India, Cambodian and Iranian rap, refugee letters from Nauru, graffiti in Tanzania, and the silent spaces of trauma in Chile and Guantanamo. The contexts and media of these autobiographical trauma texts are diverse, yet they are linked by attention to questions of who gets to speak/write/inscribe autobiographically and how and where and why, and how can silences in the wake of traumatic experiences be read. These essays deliberately set out to establish some new fields for research in trauma studies by reaching out to a broader global context, into various texts, media and artifacts, representing diverse histories with specific attention to different voices, bodies, memories and subjectivities. This collection addresses the contemporary circuits of trauma story, and the media and icons and narratives that carry trauma story to political effect and emotional affect.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Ego-histoire is an unlikely import into Australian Indigenous studies. At least so it seemed to me in Paris in December 2011 at the conference that became a prehistory to this collection of essays. I listened as a non-Indigenous Australian researcher, sharing a concern for ethical ways of living, researching and teaching in Aboriginal country, and wondered why it was that ego-histoire was so confronting, and so unfamiliar in its address to Indigenous Australian studies. A number of writers here reflect this uneasiness, and in Pierre Nora’s essay ‘Is “Ego-Histoire” Possible?’ (translated here in the Appendix) we see why this is so. Nora highlights the features of the intellectual environment in France that led to ego-histoire: ‘the return of the subject’, the historiographical turn, and the new regime of historicity in France in the late-1970s and early-1980s. The transposition of each of these to Australian Indigenous studies now immediately unsettles the gendered, national and individualist presuppositions of the project—limits of the genre that remain unremarked in Nora’s essay. As a ‘bemused’ Jane Haggis suggests, Nora’s cool, encompassing, explanatory gaze and its singular unitary history of the nation is unsettled in contemporary Australian studies. Like a number of other writers here, Haggis turns to ‘entanglement’ to understand the relations between self and other, the history of the narrator and the narrated, that circulate in contemporary Australian autobiographical writing, a writing that draws the contact zone and the incommensurability of Indigenous and settler histories into thinking about the self and its professional conduct as a humanities scholar. There is, Gillian Cowlishaw argues, a messiness in thinking about ‘us’ and ‘other’. In response, Cowlishaw turns to the diary as a genre that personalises the professional life, as do a number of other writers here (see, for example, Jan Idle’s ‘field notes’, and Ros Poignant’s journal). This self-reflexive form of writing breaks down the distinctions between ‘research practice’ and ‘findings or data’, and what emerges is an ‘entanglement’ of Indigenous and non-Indigenous worlds that is both personally felt and professionally practised. The diary grasps that intimate immersion of the self in other worlds, a destabilising and disorienting knowledge and experience of otherness that recurs in this ‘provincialisation’ of ego-histoire into postcolonial space and time. More generally, these essays practise forms of autobiographical writing that enable a performative sense of self,, a working through memory and recognition, and what Franca Tamisari calls ‘a personal way of knowing others’ that finds expression in the classroom as well as in research practice: a ‘methodology of encounter’, Jan Idle suggests, where observing ‘self out of place becomes part of the project’.' (Introduction)