Autobiographical Work Research Articles

Translator's Note: Negotiating Four Generations of Voices (with a Little Help from Google Earth)

T he Herring and the Saxophone (Le Hareng et le saxophone), a hybrid work by Sylvie Weil, is listed as a novel, yet just as in Tim O’Brien’s The Things We Carried and Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, the narrator ’s voice carries the author’s own name. It’s written in the first person, but the narrator doesn’t fully introduce herself until chapter 5. An autobiographical work centered on family more than self—if the two can be separated. Not Weil’s own family, but her in-laws, generations of them, down to the little boy Ricky, who would one day grow up to be Eric, Sylvie’s husband. “The Cadillac,” recounting a family gathering to celebrate a bar mitzvah, is the first chapter of this family saga that skips back and forth through time and space, without the vast arc of an epic narrative. One moment, we’re in early nineteenthcentury Ukraine; then, it’s 1980 and we’re in the Bronx. The stories are at once iconic and idiosyncratic: fleeing the Russian pogroms, petitioning to acquire an anglicized name in the New World, only to see the magistrate restore its Jewish flavor, giving us a glimpse of America’s limited religious tolerance. Chapters are like the snapshots occasionally referenced by Weil, and reading the novel is like flipping back and forth through the pages of a photo album: we point at familiar faces peering out from different moments in their lives and ask, wanting to weave together the strands of this family history, “Which cousin is he again? And how was he related to that woman? Are they the ones who left Ukraine and somehow ended up in Ontario, or did they come to New York?” Weil takes us back and forth from Uman to New Rochelle, with detours to Nikolayev, Brooklyn, Toronto, Queens, Connecticut. As the daughter-in-law, the reluctantly accepted Franco-American object of curiosity “just off the boat” from Paris when she met the man she would marry, Weil as author/narrator sits both inside and outside the family. In “The Cadillac,” we meet four generations of Shackmans. Many of the stories have been handed down to Weil by Clara, wife of Mounya of the Cadillac-with-Dagmars. Clara, the family historian, carried oral archives in her memory across time and borders, almost two centuries of lore stretching back deep into the old country. As co-translator Catherine Zobal Dent and I work our way into this cast of characters who have already worked their way into our hearts, we are constantly negotiating voices, places, and eras. Using Google Earth, we follow the peregrinations of the various family branches from old Russia to New York. We research idioms, vocabulary , exclamations to choose words that fit time and place, personality and situation. One curious aspect of this project is that we are translating the younger generations of this family into their own language: in this chapter, for example, we understand from the French original that everyone but the elderly cousin from Toronto is speaking English. The original itself is a translation, making our work something of a reclamation. Our method involves each of us translating a draft of a given chapter independently before we meet for our collaborative sessions. Sitting together at the screen, Catherine and I comb through our drafts one sentence at a time, discussing them, melding them in a process that spawns surprising solutions. Working together helps us keep our eye on the immediate sentence and the larger narrative, simultaneously . We’ve learned to articulate our choices to each other and, ultimately, to integrate our varying interpretations. We find it rewarding to let go of our egos and focus instead on bringing these voices alive for a new readership. Notebook Lynn E. Palermo’s translations, some in collaboration with Catherine Zobal Dent, have appeared in journals including Kenyon Review Online, Exchanges Literary Journal, and World Literature Today. In 2015 Palermo and Dent were awarded a French Voices Award for their co-translation, Destiny’s Repairman, by Cyrille Fleischman. Editorial note: Turn to page 30 to read Palermo and Dent’s translation of Weil’s...

Heaven and Hell: A Novel of a Manchukuo Childhood by Takarabe Toriko

Reviewed by: Heaven and Hell: A Novel of a Manchukuo Childhood by Takarabe Toriko Norman Smith (bio) Takarabe Toriko, Heaven and Hell: A Novel of a Manchukuo Childhood. Translated by Phyllis Birnbaum. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2018. viii, 133 pp. Paperback $24.00, isbn 978-0-8248-7655-5. Heaven and Hell is a disturbing, semifictional autobiographical work crafted by Takarabe Toriko (b. 1933), a celebrated Japanese poet who was raised in [End Page 289] the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo (1932–1945), contemporary Northeast China. This translation of the 2005 Japanese book is the latest work of Phyllis Birnbaum, whose scholarship is revealing to English-language readers fascinating and important portraits of life in early-to-mid-twentieth century China, Japan, and Manchuria. Birnbaum's earlier works include a monograph on a cross-dressing princess of the defunct Qing Dynasty, Manchu Princess, Japanese Spy (2015) and the translation of a hugely popular Japanese novel set during the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), Clouds Above the Hill (2012). Birnbaum's skills as a historian and translator are well suited to do this volume justice. Heaven and Hell recounts, in two parts, twelve years of Takarabe's childhood spent in northern Manchukuo (Heaven) and the flight from there (Hell) as Japanese refugees from the puppet state's collapse in 1945 were targeted by Chinese locals, Soviet invaders, and the Japanese themselves. The violence that gives the second part of the book its name plagues the desperately fleeing Japanese and permeates Hell overall. However, such violence is also visited in Heaven on the Chinese, especially on the so-called "bandits" (ex-warlord soldiers, criminals, communists, and others protesting the Japanese occupation) who the author's father, as a member of the occupying military, was employed to pacify but more often just killed in cold blood. This tale of Heaven and Hell is told through the experiences of the protagonist Masuko and, importantly, her relations with her father Yamamoto Yoshirō and her mother, Yukie. Heaven begins in the spring of 1932, with a recounting of the Japanese occupation of Jiamusi, a remote northern city that in a decade grew so much that even members of the Japanese monarchy visited it. The Japanese were led by Captain Tōno, Yoshirō's friend who, after he is killed in battle in China proper, becomes a sort of patron saint to the Japanese in the city, with his own Memorial Hall that later serves as a refuge for Yukie and her children. The early years of Manchukuo are depicted as a time of murder, plunder, and generalized turmoil. In early 1934, Yoshirō and Yukie arrive, with two-month-old Masuko, at the end of a journey in which one could lose "your luggage or your life" (p. 7). En route to Jiamusi, Masuko's parents are awed by the region's differences from Japan—its vast forests, seemingly endless rivers, and a boundless land far less populated. But it was also a type of "Wild West" where people commonly carried arms to protect themselves from dangers that lurked around every corner. The imagined, "exotic" Manchukuo that Japanese leaders touted as a lifeline, and as a bulwark against aggressive Soviet advances into Asia, was severely tested as Yukie was horrified by the sight of Jiamusi's "streets full of severed heads!" (p. 9) Heads of "bandits" hung from telegraph poles and adorned poles and spikes. The title for this first section, "Heaven," is a perplexing and [End Page 290] ironic inversion of the common contemporary assertion that Manchukuo was a "paradise land." Masuko and her parents, unlike most Japanese in Manchukuo, lived in multiethnic settings, first in a subdivided house with Chinese and then in the Suixi Hotel, where Yoshirō was later employed as an associate manager, among a staff of Manchus, Mongols, and Chinese. Each family member has different reactions to the characters around them. Masuko is curious about others and, befitting a child, is only somewhat aware of the privilege her ethnicity brings her. Masuko is apprehensive of the Russian man with whom her mother has an affair, but she is absolutely terrified of her brutal father, who is said to give "off...

Choroba twórcy jako źródło pamięci i zapomnienia. Na wybranych przykładach

In the article “A Creator’s Illness as a Source of Memory and Forgetting: Selected Examples” I examine autobiographical works in which writers reveal their illnesses. I am interested not so much in the description of the given ailment, but rather in the embroilment resulting from being ill and from the persistent conflict between memory and forgetting. Becoming aware of the illness turns out to be a critical point, forcing the writers to re-evaluate their own lives. Consequently, memory and forgetting assume a new status. I also attempt to juxtapose the universal nature of being ill and the intimacy of this experience; I point out the similarities and differences involved in dealing with illnesses, whose common denominator seems to be the necessity of confronting the limits of memory and the expansiveness of forgetting.

Translating Desire: The Multilingual and Inter-Artistic Practice of Abdellah Taïa

Purportedly the first openly gay writer published in Morocco, Abdellah Taia has become a name to reckon within the French literary landscape he has made his adopted home. His largely autobiographical work follows in a tradition of the Francophone Moroccan récit exemplified by his clearest precursor, Rachid O., while also demonstrating a frankness and a concern with contemporary issues such as migration and the Maghrebi transition to individualism that is clearly his own. His star has further risen with English translations of his work and his film L'Armée du salut, adapted from his novel of the same name. This article examines his claims to being the first to come out in a literature that, as Jarrod Hayes and other scholars have emphasized, was already steeped in homoeroticism. It focuses upon the issue of language difference, noting the ways in which French and Arabic circumscribe queer identity formation with pronounced socioeconomic repercussions and also by taking into consideration Taïa's desire to move between literary and cinematic languages. Linguistic identity, it argues, takes on its greatest importance at the moment of any identity formation, particularly insofar as language itself so often operates as a metaphor for other identity vectors, such as race, gender and sexuality.

Б. Фришмут и Т. Бернхард: автобиографическая проза

The article is devoted to the autobiographical prose of Austrian writers Barbara Frishmuth and Thomas Bernhard. The material used were works by B. Frishmuth “Monastery School” and T. Bernhard “Cause”, in which the features of the “biographical author” are clearly seen. The research is conducted in a comparative aspect. It is reported that in these works devoted to the problem of the keeping girls and boys in boarding schools, the issue of the interaction of religion and the school in the education of children in postwar Austria is raised. Particular attention is paid to the fact that both authors have experience of staying out of the family: the life of B. Bernstein is described in bright colors, and Bernhard’s autobiographical prose hopelessness is seen. The selected perspective of the study takes into account women's approach to dealing with problems in the work of Barbara Frishmuth. The relevance of the study is stipulated by the interest of modern Russian literary studies to the trends of development of German-language literature of the XX century, insufficient study of the work of the Austrian writer B. Frishmuth in the domestic literary criticism and lack of a comparative analysis of the autobiographical works of two outstanding representatives of Austrian literature. It is shown that the comparison of the two works may be a part of a more close study of the dialogue between B. Frishmuth and T. Bernhard.

Ancient Greek Legend in Modern Japanese Literature: “Run, Melos!” by Dazai Osamu

Dazai Osamu (1909-1948), a modern Japanese writer, wrote “Run, Melos!” in 1940. The short story is a rework of an Ancient Greek legend of Damon and Pythias from the 4th century B.C., which was introduced to Dazai through Schiller’s version of the legend, “The Hostage”. The legend, based on a true event, represents the perfect friendship and was reworked a number of times by different antique writers. After having been forgotten for a while, it reappeared in the Middle Ages as a fictional story and has gotten many new adaptations from then on. One of them was Schiller’s ballad in 1798, which – alongside an anecdote from Dazai’s own life – represented the basis for Dazai’s story. Even though “Run, Melos!” is not an autobiographical work, Dazai managed to pass his own feelings onto the characters, add some biblical elements, and included a never-before-employed dark twist in the story, thus making his version more realistic than the preceding ones. Despite the distance in time and place between him and the legend, with “Run, Melos!”, Dazai managed to retell a Western literature story, making it a part of the Japanese literature as well, adding motifs and themes influenced by his own life, time, and place.

Truth, death and memory in Christine Brooke-Rose’s autobiographical writings

ABSTRACTChristine Brooke-Rose published two ostensibly autobiographical works; the quasi-fictionalised ‘antibiography’ Remake and Life: End of which takes a philosophical rather than narrative form. Utilising correspondence and other personal documents, this paper concerns the notable life events which Brooke-Rose left unaddressed in her writing (war work, illness, marriage breakdown and poststructuralist feuding), the reasons for these excisions and what such a process reveals about the act of transcribing life. It is argued that Brooke-Rose’s approach to autobiography reflects in microcosm her deep concern for writing as both individual trace and transhuman memory; a sublime form made ridiculous by its everyday limitations.

Mei Lanfang quanji 梅 蘭芳全集 ( The complete works of Mei Lanfang ). Edited by Fu Jin 傅謹. 8 vols. Beijing: Beijing chubanshe and Zhongguo xiju chuban she, 2016

Mei Lanfang quanji 梅 蘭芳全集 (The complete works of Mei Lanfang). Edited by Fu Jin 傅謹. 8 vols. Beijing: Beijing chubanshe and Zhongguo xiju chuban she, 2016 David L. Rolston (bio) David L. Rolston University of Michigan David L. Rolston David L. Rolston is Associate Professor of Chinese Language and Literature in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan. After working and publishing on traditional Chinese fiction (with an emphasis on traditional Chinese fiction commentary and its influence on later writers), for some time he has turned his attention primarily to traditional Chinese theater in general and Jingju (Peking opera) in particular. While studying in Taiwan in the early 1980s he discovered that Jingju was a convenient avenue to at least one kind of Chinese past. He participated in student productions and worked at Fuxing Opera School in Taiwan. He has taught and lectured at the National Academy of Chinese Theater Arts, and produced English language introductory material and subtitles for Jingju and Kunqu troupes in Taiwan, Beijing, and the U.S. He is presently working on a book on the “textualization” of Jingju (the writing down, circulation, and consumption of Jingju plays in various written forms). Correspondence to: David L. Rolston, Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Michigan, 202 South Thayer Street, 5151 STB, Ann Arbor, MI 48104-1608. E-mail: drolston@umich.edu. Footnotes 1. Mei Shaowu 梅紹武, ed., Mei Lanfang quanji 梅蘭芳全集 [Complete works of Mei Lanfang], 8 vols. (Shijiazhuang: Hebei jiaoyu, 2000). 2. The older collection only included 66 pieces, earliest one dated 1945 (a total of only two were published before 1949), in its equivalent volume (Volume 3). The earliest item in Volume 1 of the new collection dates from 1919. 3. Mei Lanfang began publishing autobiographical works as early as 1943. Two examples from that year, “Sishi nian xiju shenghuo” 四十年戲劇生活 (Forty years of theatrical life) and “Zhuiyu xuan huiyi lu” 綴玉軒回憶錄 (Memoirs from Zhuiyu Studio), are included in Volume 1 of the collection (pp. 90–102 and 103–12). 4. The preface, however, does not indicate that the two versions of the diary (see below) were published in string-bound facsimile form under the same title by the publishing house of the National Library in Beijing (Guojia tushu guan chuban she 國家圖書館出版社) in 2015 (in this edition, the edited version is reproduced in photo-reprint form while material from the original version is given in typeset form). The one-page preface of the diary reproduced in the facsimile version does not appear in the new edition of Mei’s collected works. Copyright © 2018 The Permanent Conference on Chinese Oral and Performing Literature, Inc.

Rousseau e suas autobiografias: além do autorretrato

O sujeito que escreve sobre si mesmo e sua obra: eis a essência de uma obra autobiográfica. O estudo inicia pela abordagem da relação público-autor. Aqui os elementos “para quem” e “para quê”, apesar de significativos, serão secundários em face do autor que as escreve. Defendemos que o autor é uno com sua obra. Assim, Rousseau, ao se defender nas Confissões (1764-1770), está defendendo, por exemplo, o Contrato Social. Tal situação se repetirá com outras quatro obras confessionais e autobiográficas: Cartas ao Sr. Malesherbes (1762), Profissão de Fé do Vigário Saboiano (1762), Diálogos de Rousseau Juiz de Jean-Jacques (1772) e Devaneios de um caminhante solitário (1776-78).

Lakes, Rock, Forest: Placing Finnish Canadian History

Abstract This article examines uses of landscape in Finnish Canadian autobiographical writing. By framing relationships between people and landscapes as dynamic and interactive, this analysis inquires about the persistence of the Finnish Canadian “landscape myth”—that Finns settled there because of the landscape. These life writing narratives are situated within the traditions of Finnish nationalism, Finnish and Canadian settler narratives, and Finnish immigration historiography, yet are viewed as examples of the diverse ways that individuals use, understand, and represent their connections with place and landscape. The article analyzes Nelma Sillanpää's Under the Northern Lights (1994) and Aili Grönlund Schneider's The Finnish Baker's Daughters (1986), further contextualized by additional Finnish Canadian autobiographical works. Though focused on Finnish experiences in Canada, this work contributes to broader discourses on Finnish Great Lakes identities.

Art and Autobiography: A Study of the Self in Literature

In this paper, I have attempted to apply critical approaches of William C. Spengemann to study Oscar Wilde’s Salomé as an autobiographical work that involves a set of assumptions such as biographical information about the author and information about the work’s genesis, which should be given the secondary importance. Instead of the idea of defining autobiography as self-written biography, it is necessary to understand the ways in which different autobiographers write in different forms and at different times. So the main purpose of this paper is to explore the self in literature, i.e. Wilde’s Salomé. Essentially, how can a piece of literary work be considered as an autobiography that has been practiced in response to shifting ideas about the nature of the self?Crossing the Border: International Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies Vol.4(1) 2016: 19-28

Utopist with Common Sense. Self-Narration and Career Making in the Works of Ferenc Balázs

Abstract My study focuses on the self-narration of the young Transylvanian writer and social activist of the first part of the twentieth century, Ferenc Balázs, based on his personal correspondence and his autobiographical works. The medieval tradition of peregrination becomes a journey around the world which later will offer the ideological background of his work, and an evergoing clash between cultural traditions. Both his literary work and social achievement are characterized by premodern nostalgia for rural life mixed with utopian socialist ideas. The task of shaping a traditionalist, rural community according to modern idea becomes a token of individual achievement in his works. Balázs’s self-narration is contrasted in the memoirs of his wife and co-worker, Christine Frederiksen (The Alabaster Village), narrated from the special point of view of the stranger. Her interpretation comes to complete a story filled with complex interactions of cultural representations.

A Study of the Discussions on Psychiatry of Korea in the 1960s and 1970s* - From Mental Hygiene to Modern Psychiatry.

This study is to review the emergence of new psychiatrists, scientific rationalization, and popular internalization to reorganize the formation process of modern psychological medicine system. Unlike eugenic psychiatry from the Japanese Colonial Era, the social conditions and contexts forming autonomous system of psychiatry of Korea in the 1960s and 1970s have been concentrated. The discussion approach has been tried to secure two perspectives-treatment and criticism-at the same time and to expand the time and scope of study through the extensive texts such as newspapers, magazines, books, advertisements, and others in the 1960s and 1970s. Through formation of subject, rationalization, and popularization, this study has surveyed the characteristics of psychiatry in the 1960s and 1970s to accentuate complicated conditions and kinetic steps to systemize psychiatry as scientific field to promote treatment of patients by deviating from mental hygiene approaching national mental health from cleanliness and removal. The characteristics are summarized as follows. First, as the ethical models of good doctors, medical paternalistic doctors, and non-authoritarian symmetric doctors have been proposed as good psychiatrists by new medical specialists with experience of globality, a new subject emerges. However, there has been illegalization process of unlicensed medical practitioner excluded by the regulatory authority called "clearness." Second, the rationalization of psychiatry has been accelerated through the dispute of enactment of Mental Hygiene Law, segmentalization of concept of mental illness, and scientific characteristics. Especially, the disputes over enactment of Mental Hygiene Law focused on criminalization of mental patients brought a result to regulate the patients as the target of humanistic treatment and potential criminals at the same time. Third, popularization of psychiatry has embraced invisible mental illness into popular daily life through visual measure called medicine advertisement, and through the discussion about social neurosis, a new paradigm for diagnosis of Korean society has been proposed. Moreover, by focusing on autobiographical works with voices of patients, this article reveals a new doctor-patient relationship.

A STUDY OF AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL APPROACH AND UNDERSTANDING

Autobiography is a unique and fascinating document that can maintain its value in history as first person narrative while providing a specific identity of his /her ownself in literary research..Autobiographical works are by nature subjective. However, the power of personality is inseperable from the subjectivity of the author in an autobiography. Autobiographies give novel approach and in sight in to the way how individuals define themselves and understand their own experiences.

Education Intercepting The Dalit Way of Being

Through readings of Adhir Biswas’ memoirs – Deshbhager Smriti [2010. 4 vols. Kolkata: Gangchil] and Allar jomite paa [2012. Kolkata: Gangchil] – as well as Manoranjan Byapari’s autobiographical work Itibritte Chandal Jibon (2012), I study the importance of education in the lives of first-generation literate Bengali Dalit immigrants. I evaluate the journey of Biswas and Byapari from being labelled as “chhotolok”, towards becoming a part of the bhadralok social group, redefining what it means to belong to either group. I observe how education enables incorporation of these writers into the mainstream elite lifestyle and why this process of assimilation is riddled with difficulties from both ends. By briefly referring to the antagonistic relationship between the subalterns and the landlords in the Indian scenario, I note how traditional social markers of the colonial bhadralok are increasingly challenged in the postcolonial period by the non-bhadralok masses through unconventional counter-narratives. Furthermore, I discuss the role that education plays in legitimizing the position of marginalized people, such as refugees, in post-partition India. How does literacy change the perspectives of Dalit refugees towards their surroundings, and what significance does the act of writing hold for them?

Re-Writing the Nation: Literary Rehistoricisation and Counter-Hegemonic Discourse in Ken Wiwa's In the Shadow of a Saint and Jacob Dlamini's Native Nostalgia

ABSTRACTIn this article, I analyse two recent African autobiographical works for the ways in which they provide counter-hegemonic national discourses in regard to Nigeria and South Africa. The texts are In the Shadow of a Saint (2001), Ken Wiwa's memoir and biographical homage to his father, the martyred Nigerian writer and activist, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and Native Nostalgia (2009) by the South African historian, Jacob Dlamini. The article highlights the different ways in which each author challenges official discourses of post-conflict national reconciliation through the re-imagining of national histories, the narrative reconstruction of social/cultural identity and the depiction of space. Furthermore, it highlights how the subgenre of postcolonial life-writing is deployed for purposes of literary (re)historicisation and socio-political critique while drawing attention to important divergences, convergences and connections between post-2000 writing from two of Africa's eminent literary sites—Nigeria and South Africa.

Compelled to Narrate: Politics, Cairo and the Common Ground in Ahdaf Soueif’s Life Writing

This article seeks to examine the impact that urban space has had on the development of political consciousness as represented in the autobiographical work of the Anglo-Arab writer, Ahdaf Soueif. The article focuses on Mezzaterra: Fragments from the Common Ground (2004) and Cairo: My City, Our Revolution (2012) in order to argue that Soueif’s broad political affiliations, which extend beyond Egypt, nonetheless emerge from her relationship with the city of her birth, Cairo.

In Dream and Soil: A Conversation with Bea Nettles

Bea Nettles rose to prominence at the beginning of 1970 with her autobiographical mixed-media and photographic work. During that year she had a solo show at the George Eastman House (now the George Eastman Museum, or GEM) in Rochester, New York, and was also included in the seminal exhibition Photography into Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). In 2014, the show was re-mounted at Hauser & Wirth in New York City as the retitled The Photographic Object, 1970 and was accompanied by a publication of the same name from the University of Arizona and the University of California Press. Nettles has been exhibiting her work for nearly fifty years and is included in the collections of MoMA; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the National Gallery of Canada; the Phillips Collection in Washington DC; the International Museum of Photography at the GEM; and the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, Tucson. Her newest book, Dante Enters Hell (2016), has sold out and is in nine special collections libraries including those of Yale, Duke, and Northwestern universities. In 2016, her early work began to pop up around the country in various exhibitions including at the Met, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Portland Museum of Art. The recent reappearance of Nettles's early work--from the single pieces of the late 1960s to her Mountain Dream Tarot card deck (1975) and her visual autobiography Flamingo in the Dark (1979)--in museums and galleries is neither happenstance nor anomaly, but rather evidence of her importance in the history of American art. This work is visceral, poignant, humorous, and multivalent--and is as indicative of the experimental approach by many photographers of the 1960s and '70s as it is striking to twenty-first-century eyes. In particular, the return to materiality and the autobiographical in photography by many contemporary artists, as well as the mixed-media and photographic approach of painters today, prove Nettles was both ahead of her time and firmly situated within a legacy of artists (from Pictorialism to Victorian collage and book-making to Dada) in the history of photography. Although today artists must contend with the digital revolution, either embracing it or reacting against it, the impact of Nettles's layered approach, particularly in her early work, cannot be underestimated. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] I met Nettles in 2005 as an incoming photography student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she was teaching photography and book-arts classes and is now professor emerita. I gardened for her in exchange for books and time from 2007 to 2008, which I count as a pivotal year in my growth as an artist and being. In August of last year, I reconnected with Nettles at her home in Urbana for a conversation about the recent exhibitions of her early work and Dante Enters Hell. COLIN EDGINGTON: I had a student who saw your work recently at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA). I think it is incredible that these early works are being seen by younger generations. What does it mean for you to see it exhibited forty-five years later? BEA NETTLES: Sister in the Parrot Garden, which is the piece on view at the PMA, was made at Penland [School of Crafts] near Asheville, North Carolina, in the summer of 1970. I would have been just out of graduate school. I still remember that piece because it was so difficult to make. When I coated Rockland Liquid Light photo emulsion on fabric it was extremely fragile; it would be processed just like a print, but if it folded in on itself the emulsion would smear and come off. It was delicate from start to finish. Often a mixed-media piece would start through experimentation and then I'd see the potential in it, or it'd crack open my thinking. I try not to be afraid or take myself too seriously with capital-A art, but I can be obsessed and I follow through on things. It is a delicate balance between my humor and being very serious, and I think my work reflects that. …

Different Identity Formations in Bengal Partition Narratives by Dalit Refugees

This essay examines the representation of Dalit refugees’ experiences in post-Partition West Bengal through Adhir Biswas’ memoirs Deshbhager smriti ([Biswas, Adhir. 2010. Deshbhager Smriti. 4 vols. Kolkata: Gangchil], Bengali) and Allar jomite paa ([Biswas, Adhir. 2012. Allar jomite paa. Kolkata: Gangchil], Bengali) and Manoranjan Byapari’s autobiographical work Itibritte chandal jibon ([Byapari, Manoranjan. 2012. Itibritte Chandal Jibon. 1 vol. Kolkata: Kolkata Prakashan], Bengali). In terms of the literary representation of Bengali refugees, until recently it was only the voice of the bhadralok class that was heard, which spoke for all sections of refugees. I suggest Bengali refugeeness cannot be constructed as a “homogenized” phenomenon belonging only to the bhadralok class. Such a representation screens the non-bhadralok Dalit and Muslim refugee’s voice, whom the East Bengali bhadralok had socioeconomically subjugated up until Partition. Lacking the pre-given criteria for being considered “refined” – high caste, economic empowerment and cultural and social capital – but progressively acquiring them under the auspices of post-Partition social dynamics, how do Biswas and Byapari encounter the signification of bhadralok? What new notions of “bhadra” and “Dalit” are formed in their respective situations as a result of marriage between the “refined” and “unrefined” ways of living? In answering these questions, this essay approaches the bhadralok--chhotolok undercurrents in the above texts and examines the difficulty of pinning down their identities within any single category.

Harriet Ann Jacobs: feminismo e literatura

Este artigo concentra-se na apresentação de Incidents in the Life of Slave Girl (1861), de Harriet Ann Jacobs, com base na noção de autobiografia proposta por Philippe Lejeune (2008). Propõe-se um entrecruzamento desse gênero com as teorias feministas, com ênfase no feminismo negro, devido à relevância da obra para a Literatura negra e feminista, bem como para o Movimento Feminista e os Movimentos Negros do Brasil. Tendo em vista que se trata de escrita autobiográfica, com o relato de uma mulher em situação de escravidão nos Estados Unidos do século XIX, defende-se que a leitura de Incidents nos ajuda a compreender a importância da voz da mulher negra escravizada no Brasil, diante da escassez de registros acerca de obras literárias escritas por pessoas nessa situação.