Editor's Note

Abstract

Editor's Note Craig Howes When George Simson started this journal in 1978, in addition to declaring it would be an interdisciplinary quarterly—which in those days pretty much meant literary, historical, and psychological—he also hoped to make it a forum for international discussions of what he definitely thought of as "biography," but which over the years has come to take on the contours associated with "life writing"—the same thing etymologically, of course, but something now very different in the critical and theoretical realm. George pursued this goal of international relevance relentlessly. The first conference and proceedings publication sponsored by the journal, New Directions in Biography (1981), brought together biographers and subjects ranging from Japan, Great Britain, Africa, France, the United States, Canada, and the former Yugoslavia. Shortly after the creation of the Center for Biographical Research at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa in 1988, another conference and proceedings volume, Biography East and West (1989), leaned heavily into biographical research dealing with or emerging from Japan, China, India, and the "Third World"—South Africa, Palestine, and Oceania—as well as essays dealing with European observers looking East. One of George's last initiatives before his retirement as director of the Center in 1997 was a conference (1995) and proceedings on Life Writing from the Pacific Rim: Essays from Japan, China, Indonesia, India, and Siam, with a Psychological Overview (1997), part of an initiative—never realized—to create a Histories of Asian Biography series under the Center's monograph imprint. Over the past twenty-five years, the journal's and the Center's commitment to global inclusion has resulted in the International Auto/Biography Association's conference on Life Writing and Translations, held in Honolulu in 2008, with a special issue of Biography devoted to the topic in 2009, and in such Biography Monographs as Locating Life Stories: Beyond East-West Binaries in (Auto)Biographical Studies (2012), edited by Maureen Perkins, containing essays from Australia, China, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Malaysia, South Africa, and Hawai'i. And any glance through the tables of contents for the past hundred or so issues of the journal will also encounter a very substantial number of articles not emerging from subjects or writers located within the Western Europe/North American corridor, and even entire special issues devoted to such subjects as "Baleful Postcoloniality" (2013), or "Caste and Life Narratives" (2017), later published as an edited collection by Primus Books in Delhi in 2019. Finally, under the able editorial direction of John [End Page v] David Zuern, for the past few years our International Year in Review feature has offered brief overviews of interesting developments in a host of countries and regions. I am mentioning this constant in the life of Biography and the Center because when considering the contents of this "regular" issue, I realized that what began as an aspiration has with great effort become the norm. The five articles in this installment feature writers and subjects from South Africa, Uganda, Lebanon, India, and France, representing an equally diverse range of approaches to life writing—whether through fashion, documentaries, oral histories, photographs, memoirs, biographies, or "anti-biographies." I believe that George would find some of the theoretical approaches or topics puzzling—certainly far afield from biography as he understood and loved it. But I know he would be very happy that his dream of a journal that made its best effort to be international has been realized. And it will continue to do so. [End Page vi] Copyright © 2022 The George and Marguerite Simson Biographical Research Center