Panel: Alternative Knowledges
Copanelists: Kate Douglas and Gillian Whitlock
My paper explores Playing with Fire (U Minnesota P, 2006), the autoethnographic narrative of the Sangtin Yatra, a collective of women from Sitapur, Uttar Pradesh, India. With Indian-American feminist scholar Richa Nagar, they produced a collaborative life narrative in Hindi derived from their lives and work as community activists. Published in New Delhi in 2004, the narrative was controversial because of its critique of the politics of the NGO with which they had worked. Their project, now in English translation and circulating globally, proposes an intriguing new model of autoethnographic life narrative that translates feminist cultural work in several ways, not least linguistically.
Playing with Fire is the story of the group’s “journey” (yatra) toward understanding their lives through storytelling, based in oral memory work (most were not literate), discussion-based revision, and theoretical analysis of their personal life histories. Collectively, the nine women address the domination of the NGO that claimed to speak for Indian women in the region, yet, they feel, effaced their experience and the complexities of their—in some cases, casted—positions. The project thus seeks a collective method for raising and recording consciousness about women’s lives that would not leave them vulnerable to overwriting or appropriation as voiceless subalterns. Their discussions and reflections, as written up by Richa Nagar, address the problematics of who can produce knowledge in a transnational context, what possibilities exist for equitable collaboration, and how large-scale national and international venues circulate and consume such projects.
I argue that Playing
with Fire highlights the work of
translation and inverts the framework of
ethnography in several ways:
Monday, June 23 • 12:30–1:45 • Keoni Auditorium
Keynote Panel: Life Writing and Translations—Word by Word
Copanelists: Mary Besemeres, Bella Brodzki, and Manuela Costantino
Julia Watson has co-written Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (second edition forthcoming 2009), and co-edited five collections with Sidonie Smith, most recently the anthology Before They Could Vote: American Women’s Autobiographical Writing, 1819–1919 (2006). She is Associate Dean for Curriculum and Administration in the College of Humanities, and Associate Professor of Comparative Studies at The Ohio State University.