Panel: Alternative Knowledges
Copanelists: Kate Douglas and Julia Watson
Contemporary life narrative is constantly on the move, circulating as an exotic commodity in a world of mobile texts, multinational publishing enterprises, mass media, and migrant audiences. Autobiography moves in unpredictable passages across cultures, and is vital to the imaginative work of modern subjectivity and struggles for a place to speak in the public sphere. It is fundamental to the struggle for recognition among individuals and groups, to the constant creation of what it means to be human and the rights that fall from that, and to the ongoing negotiation of imaginary boundaries between others and ourselves. Autobiography travels across cultures, and increasingly, across new technologies to constantly affirm and expand our sense of what makes for what Judith Butler calls a “grievable life.”
Autobiography travels across species boundaries too, and with the same intent. In this paper I will return to what is arguably one of the seminal contemporary works of autobiography, Dian Fossey’s Gorillas in the Mist (1983), to consider the importance of the lives of animals in contemporary life narrative emerging from Africa. Fossey’s book expands and complicates debates about what makes for a grievable life, and it is one of the most notable markers of a posthuman imagination in contemporary autobiography. Just a decade after Gorillas in the Mist, the human population of Rwanda was decimated in genocide, and so the narrative laid down by Fossey’s autobiography becomes entangled in one of the most complicated ideoscapes of life writing now. Here the species boundary becomes a site of extraordinary anxiety, and the ongoing proliferation of life narrative from these unstable borderlands where all life is precarious mediates an uneasy mix of human rights and posthumanism. This is the afterlife of Fossey’s story.
Thursday, June 26 • 12:30–1:45 • Keoni Auditorium
Keynote Panel: Life Writing and Translations—Changing the Subject
Copanelists: G. Thomas Couser, Susanna Egan, Leigh Gilmore, and Alfred Hornung
Gillian Whitlock is a professor in the School of English, Media Studies and Art History at the University of Queensland. Her most recent book is Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit (Chicago UP 2007), a study of life narrative and the “war on terror,” and she coedited (with Anna Poletti) the “Autographics” issue of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly (Winter 2008), and (with Kate Douglas) the double “Trauma Texts” issues of Life Writing (2008) (forthcoming as a Routledge book). She is currently working on a book titled Postcolonial Life Writing (for Oxford UP), and in 2009 she will be a visiting fellow at the Humanities Research Centre at the Australia National University in Canberra, co-convening a conference on the limits of the human.