Panel: Memoirs of Home, Homeland, and the Crossing of Cultures
Copanelists: Timothy Dow Adams and Zhao Baisheng
Memoirs by authors “returning” to countries of their parents’ or grandparents’ origin are a growing subgenre of travel narrative. “Ancestral quest” travel writing dates back at least to Alex Haley’s Roots (1976). Recent memoirs of travel to familial homelands are distinguished by new dynamics, the key one being an increasingly transnational sense of identity and cultural allegiance. I’ll be discussing two British examples, Saira Shah’s The Storyteller’s Daughter (2003) and Charlotte Hobson’s Black Earth City: A Year in the Heart of Russia (2002), and two American, David Mura’s Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei (1991, reprinted 2005) and Katie Kitamura’s Japanese for Travellers (2006).
If travel books can be read as amateur ethnography, those of second and third-generation authors exploring places of family origin can be seen as autoethnographic narratives, where the culture at issue is both known and foreign. Phrases like “intimate curiosity” and “displaced recognition” recur in these memoirs. The primary question I’m considering is whether such texts avoid romanticizing and/or patronizing “foreign” subjects, tendencies some regard as intrinsic to the travel genre. Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan argue that in A Small Place, Jamaica Kincaid’s memoir of revisiting her birthplace, Kincaid views “her fellow Antiguans with what looks suspiciously like condescension.” Kim Scott, an Australian author of Noongar descent, describes the dismaying experience of recognizing in a draft something of the attitudes of the local newspaper’s travel sections: “a sense of visiting remote Aboriginal communities, and presenting Aboriginal people only as some sort of exotic ‘other.’” Does a family connection sensitize writers to the ethics of representation more than writers with no (known) ties to a place? What roles do cultural memory, fluency in the language, and perceptions of race play in representations of “intimately strange” societies?
Monday, June 23 • 12:30–1:45 • Keoni Auditorium
Keynote Panel: Life Writing and Translations—Word by Word
Copanelists: Bella Brodzki, Manuela Costantino, and Julia Watson
Mary Besemeres is Research Associate in the School of Language Studies, Australian National University, where she holds an ARC “Discovery” grant to research Anglophone cross-cultural travel writing. She is co-editor of the journal Life Writing, and author of Translating One’s Self: Language and Selfhood in Cross- Cultural Autobiography (Peter Lang 2002), and articles including “Anglos Abroad: Memoirs of Immersion in a Foreign Language,” Biography 28.1 (Winter 2005: 27–42). Most recently, she coedited with Anna Wierzbicka Translating Lives: Living with Two Languages and Cultures (U of Queensland P, 2007).