Mary Besemeres

Anglos Abroad: Memoirs of Immersion in a Foreign Language

This paper compares recent narratives of immersion in a foreign language and culture by authors from Australia, Britain, and the United States. These writers occupy an ambiguous position at a time when English has acquired the status of a global language. In one sense, they are representatives of the dominant language and culture of contemporary experience. Yet in another, they can be seen as part of a wider resistance to the ascendancy of English, traversing its borders to explore other ways of being-in-the-world.

The Ethnographic Work of Cross-Cultural Memoir

(2010). The Ethnographic Work of Cross-Cultural Memoir. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies: Vol. 25, The Work of Life Writing, pp. 219-230.

Mixed Mother Tongues: Memoirs of Interlingual Childhoods

Childhood involves entering “a stage which we did not design” and playing “subordinate parts in the dramas of others” (in the words of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre). What happens when the script of the “drama” a child is born into is spoken in more than one language—when the main players, ones parents, come from different, even mutually hostile speech communities? While mixed race memoir is an increasingly recognized field, memoirs of mixed mother tongue families are a less familiar genre of life writing. This article considers Irish author Hugo Hamiltons memoir The Speckled People and Algerian-born French writer Leïla Sebbars Je ne parle pas la langue de mon père as compelling examples of the mixed mother tongue genre, which explore how parental languages may be imposed or withheld, and the effects of this on childrens lives.

Editorial: Life Writing

Although this is an open issue of Life Writing, there are some strong resonances between the essays included. Several deal with transcultural issues, whether in the texts discussed or in the contributors’ own lives, in line with our special interest in cross-cultural life narrative and commitment to presenting work from a range of cultural and geographic perspectives. More broadly, experiences of displacement or disruption are key to all of the contributions, from the dislocations experienced by refugees, children of immigrants and indigenous people, to other kinds of unsettled identity: politically ambivalent, ‘exilicneurotic’, ‘unhomely’. Questions of ethics are a focus of many of the contributions. These multiple connections among the articles, reflections and reviews of recent books included in an unthemed edition of Life Writing appear to reflect some common concerns in the field of auto/biography studies today. Anna Szorenyi’s article aims to complicate the terms in which narratives by refugees are read. Drawing on Sidonie Smith and Kay Schaffer’s work on the global circulation of narratives of trauma, Szorenyi questions the validity of aspects of ‘refugee discourse’ in Australia, including some of the uses to which refugees’ statements have been put by human rights groups. She seeks to ‘disrupt the predictability of the way refugee and asylum seeker testimonies are framed, in order to suggest an ethics that does not require the display of suffering in order to inaugurate a sense of accountability’. Her article advocates an ethics of recognition in which refugees’ testimonies are understood as aiming to elicit a response from their listeners. Rather than ‘humanising’ refugees for public consumption, such narratives may call ‘our own’ humanity into question. Meghan Lau’s article on U.S. journalist Michael Herr’s Dispatches, a book of reportage on the Vietnam war, is also concerned with the ethics of life writings emerging from traumatic contexts. Herr’s reticence distinguishes him from other more overtly autobiographical practitioners of ‘the New Journalism’, but Lau uncovers elements of a repressed autobiographical narrative in Dispatches. She argues that Herr’s text offers an alternative perspective on the relationship between ethics and the self to that proposed by Charles Taylor in Sources of the Self, and articulated by David Parker in relation to autobiography. For Herr, on Lau’s account, a fragmented presentation of experience is a more ethical way to represent his witnessing of war than a narrative of progressively greater understanding. Katherine Larson, Kimberley Canton, Amelia DeFalco and Helmut Reichenbaecher also take issue with expectations of ‘recognizable progress and