Gillian Whitlock

Consuming Passions: Reconciliation in Women's Intellectual Memoir

My reading brings together three texts of autobiographical criticism that, on the face of it, have quite different locations geographically, his torically, and intellectually. However, by reading across these three auto biographical acts I want to place them on one of the moving frontiers in contemporary autobiographical writing, a space of critical and political engagement where (to summarize my argument in a single and very broad brush stroke) black testimony and white memoir are engaging as inter texts. Genres of autobiography trigger, reflect, react, and coexist. In these texts, reconciliation is understood as a discursive field that both requires and organizes the interaction of testimony and memoir. To put this in black and white so starkly is risky. On the one hand, it does not do justice to the complex speaking positions that are currently available to Black, Native, and Indigenous people whose testimonies I read and hear. In Canada, South Africa, and Australia in the past decade, insti tutional arrangements (such as inquiries and commissions) have been in place whereby the peoples dispossessed by settler colonialism have been able to testify and to have their stories circulated in public through a vari ety of media. Witnessing these public testimonies of trauma and loss through memoir has been one way of engaging with these testimonies. Reconciliation is the most readily available discursive framework for link ing testimony to memoir. It sets out a way of listening and attending, and it emerges as a deliberately staged discursive framework for cross-cultural communication in a community beset by the aftermath of trauma. Three recent intellectual autobiographies are the focus of this article Helen Hoys How Should I Read These? Native Women Writers in Canada, Inga Clendinnens Tigers Eye, and Antjie Krogs Country of My Skull.I Each of these is a performance of listening and acknowledgement that calls for different professional practice among the intelligentsia. Hoy is a literary critic and academic in Canada, Clendinnen is a historian and philosopher in Australia, and Krog is a poet and journalist in South Africa. Each draws on discourses of reconciliation to perform a witnessing and to model and experiment with ethical and accountable styles of intellectual work in the light of recent testimonies about nationally sanctioned racism. Memoir

Letters from Nauru

In the recent past, collection of letters exchanged between asylum seekers held as part of the Pacific Solution and their advocates on the Australian mainland have begun to enter the archives and become available to scholarly work. This article considers the Burnside/Durham collection of letters from Nauru recently acquired as part of the Fryer collection at the University of Queensland. It uses Stanleys concept of the epistolarium to examine how the letter operates as a particularly appropriate medium for these narratives of grief and loss; how they mediate processes of testimony and witnessing; and how Durhams art work, included in the collection, speaks to the situation of the second person.

The hospitality of cyberspace: mobilizing asylum seeker testimony online

This article focuses on maritime voyages filmed and narrated by asylum seekers, where they become “produsers” of their own testimonial narratives that are then disseminated through both conventional and new media. Social media offers new venues and opportunities for the dissemination of testimony generated by the asylum seekers, from within the boats, trucks, and planes that transport them. Asylum seekers are not citizens seeking democracy in the public spaces of their own homelands; on the contrary, they are stigmatized as the barbarians at our gates, and as a threat to the security of the nation. In their hands, however, smartphones and social media enable new forms of testimonial narrative, from within spaces of detention. Can we speak of the hospitality of cyberspace on behalf of the dispossessed?

Salvage: Locating Lives in the Migration Museum

ABSTRACT The ‘Locating Lives’ conference in Adelaide in December 2015 included two off-campus expeditions in its programme: a visit to the Adelaide Migration Museum, and a beach walk to Glenelg. Given the unique oceanic imaginary attached to the Asia Pacific region, museums, beaches and boats are key sites for locating life narratives here. A series of life narratives that feature memories of child migration to Australia in the early sixties are featured here: Jimmy Barnes’ memoir Working Class Boy; the testimonies in the ‘On Their Own – Britain’s Child Migrants’ exhibition that has featured in migration museums in Britain and Australia; Joe Sacco’s essay ‘The Unwanted’; and my own recollections as a British child migrant. Late last century, a turn to ‘human rights museology’ and ‘history from below’ facilitated new migration museums and exhibition spaces such as the Adelaide Migration Museum, that are open to personal testimony and artefacts that locate lives more intimately and experientially. On display, artefacts become evocative objects open to multiple stories of migration, both past and present.

Afterword: the ends of empire: in memory of Bart Moore-Gilbert, 1952-2015

It is no surprise that Bart Moore-Gilbert was part of the project that has generated this special issue of Life Writing on ‘After Empire’, and this Afterword draws together his criticism on postcolonial theory and his own life writing in memoir and social media to sustain his presence here. The problem of where to begin mapping postcolonial life narrative and what coordinates are fit for the purpose preoccupied both of us, as authors of two books that survey the field, and we last discussed this when I visited Bart at Goldsmiths to draw (again) on his encouragement and advice a few years ago. We talked about the uncertain beginnings of postcolonial life narrative in the refectory at Goldsmiths campus in East London, and later in standing-room only space of a crowded train back into the city, when Bart began to talk about a new project: his quest to understand his father’s role as an officer in the India Police Service at the end of the Raj, on the eve of Indian Independence in 1947. The postcolonial critic was turning to memoir, and pursuing a haunting question raised in an email from an Indian historian: what did your father do in service of empire? Is it too much to suggest, Bart asks, that without the engagement with the non-West, autobiography might have developed very differently? This question preoccupied his critical writing, mapping the ‘roots and routes of postcolonial life writing’ and energising the postcolonial project of ‘deprovincialising’ autobiographical studies (Moore-Gilbert “Confessions” 1). Returning to a founding moment of life writing, Saint Augustine’s Confessions (397–400 A.D.), Bart argues that the concerns conventionally associated with ‘western man’ and the European Enlightenment are determined significantly by engagements with non-western others. In his reading, Augustine’s Confessions foreshadows many of the concerns of postcolonial life writing—in its conflict over cultural location and affiliation in the Roman Mediterranean world, for example, and particularly in the distinctive cultural identity of the North African province where Augustine was born and raised, and where he acquired the African regional accent that was audible in Rome, where he was ‘sometimes patronized for being an alien’ (Moore-Gilbert “Confessions” 158), a stranger from a southern ‘colony’. The north African context of the Confessions, Bart argues, helps explain some of its radical novelty of form, that transforms the generic conventions of early Christian autobiography—with its extended focus on Augustine’s pre-conversion African experiences, for example, and its distinctive orality and aurality. This ‘founding’ text of western autobiography and its sovereign subject is, then, constructed in a dialogical relation with non-Western others.

WITNESSING, TRAUMA AND SOCIAL SUFFERING: FEMINIST PERSPECTIVES

This special issue*Witnessing, Trauma and Social Suffering: Feminist Perspectives* emerged from a conference that Rosanne Kennedy and Gillian Whitlock convened at the Australian National University in April 2009. The conference brought together scholars and critics from a range of disciplines, with the aim of conceptualising trauma, suffering, and witnessing beyond the paradigm of trauma theory that had become dominant, particularly in the humanities.

REMEDIATING THE HOAX

Abstract In 2004 Norma Khouris bestselling story of honour killing, Forbidden Love (2003), was revealed to be a hoax. Unexpectedly, in the aftermath of the hoax the fate of Khouri and her book became the subject of a major feminist documentary film by Anna Broinowski, Forbidden Lie

Trauma in the Twenty-First Century

(2007). The film offers a rigorous consideration of the hoax and its importance in debates about the politics and ethics of transnational and cross-cultural feminist engagements with narratives of distant suffering now. The film reincarnates the hoaxer into a renewed vivid presence, that opens possibilities for thinking about (and with) the hoax and, at the same time, raises questions about the ethics of feminist campaigns against honour killing.

Joe Sacco’s Australian Story

In her genealogical approach to the study of trauma, Ruth Leys situates the most recent turn to trauma studies across a range of disciplines and in relation to the waxing and waning of interest in trauma over the course of more than a century. Leys is a useful place to begin, for she reminds us that the current surge in trauma studies is distinctively shaped by politics, culture and history in and of the present, and embedded within an intellectual history that goes back to the origins of psychoanalysis in European modernity. What we have seen these past two decades, then, draws deeply on debates and therapies that have emerged variously: in the rise of psychoanalysis in the years after 1900; the phenomenon of ‘shell shock’ after the Great War; the recognition of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder amongst veterans in the wake of the Vietnam War, and feminist campaigns in the 1970s concerning sexual abuse in children. Although the germinal texts in theorising trauma and representation in the recent past have focussed on the Holocaust*/for example Dominick LaCapra, Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, and Cathy Caruth*/and although the long-term effects of trauma on survivors of the Nazi genocide was evident in the aftermath of World War II, the Holocaust did not trigger the recent upsurge of trauma studies. Ironically the history of trauma itself is marked by an alternation between episodes of forgetting and remembering, as the experiences of one generation of psychiatrists have been neglected only to be revived at a later time: ‘[j]ust as it took World War II to ‘‘remember’’ the lessons of World War I, so it took the experience of Vietnam to ‘‘remember’’ the lessons of World War II, including the psychiatric lessons of the Holocaust’ (Leys 15). A vigorous and widespread turn to the practice and theory of life writing (a term that covers biography, autobiography and variants and mutations of both) has occurred along with this most recent emergence of trauma studies. The Greek root of trauma is ‘wound’, and the experience of trauma is an overwhelming and self-shattering event that is frequently theorised as unspeakable, resistant to representation. Trauma, suggests Leigh Gilmore, takes autobiography to the limits of representation. Yet life writing thrives here at the limits, and Gilmore’s book considers the aesthetic forms and cultural practices of traumatic

Intimate Ephemera: Reading Young Lives in Australian Zine Culture

ABSTRACT Although Joe Sacco is frequently present in the frame of his comics journalism, as a witness, listener and scribe, he rarely attaches his own autobiographical experience to these representations of self. Recently some more detailed biographical detail about Joe Sacco’s own life story has begun to emerge in the frames of his comics, particularly in his work on refugees and asylum seekers. One of the least significant and little known facts about Joe Sacco’s life, his childhood as a migrant in Australia, becomes relevant here, extending his enduring commitment to ethical spectatorship, and the visibility of human rights violations, by engaging with this most difficult and intimate work of interrogating citizenship, our own and ‘others’.