Search Results

The study of autobiography has been resurgent in recent decades, and the genre is often now discussed by historians, literary critics and others alongside biographies, memoirs, letters, diaries, and reminiscences – as well as works more conventionally considered ‘history’ or ‘fiction’ -- under the banner of life writing (the term ‘self-life-writing’ is Avrom Fleishman’s). One reason for this is the rise of interdisciplinary areas of study that have found autobiography to be a particularly useful form of writing, and so have accorded it a distinctive place in the study of both authenticity and alterity. In the 1970s, women’s studies, American studies, ethnic and black studies all started to turn to autobiography for voices of ‘experience’ from within, as James Olney sees it. Or, as Martin Amis puts it in his own Experience: ‘what everyone has in them, these days, is not a novel but a memoir. We live in an age of mass loquacity. We are all writing it or at any rate talking it: the memoir, the apologia, the c.v., the cri de Coeur. Nothing, for now, can compete with experience – so unanswerably authentic, and so liberally and democratically dispensed.’

Life-writing that emerges from Palestine and the diaspora is marked by its emphasis on the collective. Following the proliferation of single-author, book-length works during the previous quarter-century, this chapter turns to focus on contemporary English-language anthologies, which gather together connected yet distinct voices through short-form life writing. This sense of communality, alongside a desire to respond to contemporary crises, is central to these anthologies of Palestinian writing. Often to a greater extent than single-author texts, anthologies actively draw attention to the fact that while the predicaments faced by Palestinians are individually experienced, they are also widespread and shared. Such texts, individually meaningful but also conversant with wider concerns and messages of solidarity, this chapter argues, are ideal components of anthologies that position themselves as future-orientated and express a desire for change at the outset.

Chapter 5 focuses on how the War on Terror’s permutations of Latina/o war literature, theater, television, film, and popular music present methodological and political challenges to conventional understandings of Latina/o relationships to power as inherently oppositional to capitalism and US imperialism. These relatively new genres include Latina/o War on Terror combat action memoir and related oral histories; wounded warrior narratives; protofascist Special Forces Über-warrior memoir and biographical profiles; Conscientious Objector testimonio, ideologically ambivalent wartime theater, and pacifist performance art; military command memoirs by junior and senior officers; as well as Latina/o spy memoir, biography, and historical fiction. Despite the authors’ profound differences in cultural heritage, experiences, and aesthetic capacities, their cultural productions cohere around intersecting, and diverging, violence-based theories of knowledge and being that extend through, but also far beyond warfare and wartime contexts. They also demonstrate the stark right-wing turn in a large segment of contemporary Latina/o life writing, which accentuates the wide range of ideological trajectories identified in earlier chapters.

Chapter 1 examines Latina/o encounters with and reclamations of indigeneity from the eighteenth century to the present. Deploying violentologies as a heuristic device and hermeneutic prism, it focuses on established and emergent Latina/o autobiographical literary genres, cinematic texts, performative popular culture spectacles, and recently recovered archival materials and unique oral histories. These texts cumulatively reveal the wide spectrum of Latina/o antipathies toward, and affiliations with, Native nations and indigenous peoples in the United States and abroad. This chapter thus foregrounds the ideological diversity of supra-Latina/o violentologies by examining the myriad Latina/o involvements in the US Indian Wars vis-à-vis ambidextrous, albeit ambivalent, Latina/o neoindigenous, as well as problematic indigenist, performances of XicanIndia/o and LatIndia/o modalities, in addition to mixed-heritage, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and nonbinary (LGBTQI+), as well as Two-Spirit warrior paradigms in Indian Country and elsewhere.