Confessions of an Errant Academic

My name is Heather Stansbury, and I am yet another voice contributing to these posts from MLA 2011. My research interests are in Romanticism, eighteenth-century literature, and theories of gender and sexuality. First and foremost, I’d like to offer my sincere gratitude to the University of Washington’s Simpson Center for sponsoring this blog, and I’d like to thank my colleagues Tim Welsh and Paul Jaussen for their help and expertise in all things technological.

My contribution will be a reflection on the Presidential Forum, "Lives and Archives: Finding, Framing, and Circulating Narrated Lives Now." I’d like to begin with a confession that will no doubt be shocking, and perhaps appalling, to many: there are many things about academic conferences that I often do not like. However, this MLA has changed my mind about many of those things, and this session was the one of the best that I’ve attended. Each member of the panel was so deeply invested at both the intellectual and emotional level to her or his project. In her introduction, Sidonie Smith remarked on the heterogeneity of life writing, as well as the diversity of it, and the tales the panel told certainly demonstrated this. The discussion began with Marianne Hirsch’s and Leo Spitzter’s collaboration on the life of a young Jewish woman Ella who sacrificed her personal happiness for her family’s safety in order to escape Nazism. The words that circulated around the mystery of her eventual suicide, “self-murder” as the word translates, are striking: “blood poisoning, broken heart, tragic heroine, abandoned her husband, lovers, loose woman, home wrecker, pregnant divorcée, botched abortion.” The narrative and its resonance were heartbreaking. Spitzer and Hirsch co-delivered what was perhaps the most personal of the accounts related at the session. As I am currently teaching a writing course linked to an International Studies course on Israel, this talk spoke to me the most. It caused me to reflect on the other lives destroyed by the war and made palpable how very painful the process of recovering life narratives must sometimes be. Nancy Miller’s “Between Lost and Found” was also a project that began with personal loss, and David Palumbo-Lui’s narrative of the destruction and eventual rebuilding of the International Hotel in San Francisco demonstrated how narrating lives can bring diverse people together. One of the people who became involved in his project was a young artist named Jerome Reyes. One of his most visually striking creations was a red fedora and rug made of 2005 feathers dyed the same bright red as the hat. Remarkably, both pieces were made from the dust of the I-Hotel. As viewers walked through the exhibition, they would carry the dust of the hotel, indeed the dust of the narrative, on the bottoms of their shoes. I was struck by the notion of making art from the remnants of a destroyed building that was the site of a political protest that brought together diverse groups of advocates. The talk revealed the plurality of narrating lives, and as Palumbo-Lui so beautifully put it, their “poetic interplay.” Robert Warrior detailed his experience as curator of an exhibit by artist HOCK E AYE VI EDGAR HEAP OF BIRDS. Heap of Bird’s works critique state power and the ideology of white supremacy. For this particular project he created signs that reminded the people of Illinois that they reside on indigenous peoples’ homeland. Here is an example of the text on the signs:

Fighting Illini

Today your Host

Is

Kaskaskia

While the name of the indigenous people would change ― sometimes the sign read Peoria, Kickapoo, Sac, etc. ― the Fighting Illini always remained, and it was always printed in reversed letters. Shockingly, some of the signs were vandalized. Warrior’s investment in the project made his rendering of the narrative all the more moving. And I believe that it was this common element of all the talks that made this one of the best panels that I have had the pleasure of attending. The room the session was held in was enormous, and yet, there was a haunting sense of intimacy as the panelists narrated these lives, sharing bits of their own lives as they demonstrated what Smith calls “the labor and consequences of remembering.” The panel perhaps changed my mind about academic conferences. That being said, I end with another confession: my mother is visiting Los Angeles from Central California. It is the city where she grew up, and the city that I resided in for ten years. After a decade away from the city, I am struck by how nostalgic I have been feeling. I will not be attending sessions today, but rather going to the beach and other familial places with my mom. I have no doubt that this visit will help to define my own life narrative.

Thick Testimonies

When we seek testimony, where do we look and what do we look for? How do we ask for it? And how do we then read it? These three questions animated Friday's session on "Lives and Archives: Giving, Taking, and Circulating Testimony."

Leigh Gilmore began the conversation by considering how literary witnessing, the imaginative, creative, or speculative response to traumatic events, can "thicken" our understanding of those events, complementing and expanding other forms of testimony (legal, documentary, archival). She paid particular attention to those texts which cross the boundaries of fiction and nonfiction, creative imaginings and personal accounts. Her case study was Jamaica Kincaid's Autobiography of My Mother, a text which, like much of Kincaid's work, draws heavily on her personal life while expanding those experiences through fictional devices. The result is a complex depiction of postcolonial Caribbean identity that offers a different conceptual, reflective space than the specific demands of, say, human rights discourse. Far from attempting to substitute the literary for the legal, Gilmore called for an interpretive practice similar to Kincaid's compositional strategy: reading across genres, expanding our notion of testimony to include the many texts that a traumatic history will produce.

In the second paper, William Craig Howes considered the responsibilities of researchers to their human subjects, a particularly significant question for humanists working in the field of life writing. Howes surveyed the existing protocols for such research, largely developed for the sciences, and compared them to the role of permission as it relates to biography, journalism, and ethnography. Precisely because researchers studying life narratives often maintain a personal relationship with their subjects, Howes proposed that we continue to develop a more flexible and responsive notion of "asking permission." By doing so, the humanity of those lives we are studying will emerge in a more full and cooperative way, potentially destabilizing rigid hierarchies between "researcher" and "subject." Such collaboration can enrich the stories we are trying to tell by transforming the way those tales are generated and performed.

Despite the advantages of greater collaboration, the exchanges between fractured lives can often present significant interpretive difficulties. Gillian Whitlock ended the panel by considering the tension between affective, interpersonal relationships and the larger structural forces in which those connections are situated. She took as her example a piece of embroidery gifted by a young Afghan asylum-seeker, detained by the Australian government on the Pacific island Nauru, to Elaine Smith, an Australian citizen who was advocating for and corresponding with the refugees. Whitlock pointed out that the archive of letters and photographs surrounding the piece testify to the individuality of both the giver and the receiver. Through this exchange, we can discover a narrative of compassion and mutual respect in the midst of a dehumanizing situation. And yet, the story is more complex, reflective of larger, transpersonal social and historical forces. The young man who made the embroidery piece developed his skill as a child laborer in Afghanistan, producing goods for a global consumer market. His flight to Australia was the result of international conflict and symptomatic structural inequalities on many levels. Whitlock suggested that reading the archive of exchange only for personal compassion and affective connection can cause us to lose sight of the larger histories in which those lives play out. And yet to deny the interpersonal is equally insufficient. Reading the embroidery, in this case, requires a double-vision: we must acknowledge individual, affective responses to injustice as well as a challenge the sufficiency of those exchanges.

I think it is interesting to note that Whitlock's doubled interpretive stance returns us to Gilmore's insistence that we recognize the testimonial significance of literary works and creative autobiography as well as juridical records or legal depositions. No single text, or kind of text, can give us the interpretive "thickness" that life stories, and particularly traumatic histories that cross the individual and the structural, the quotidian and the global, demand. I was reminded of Charles Reznikoff's Testimony, a work that performs those multiple interpretations at once. Could it be that the poetic is essential to maintaining complex interpretations? Or, to ask the question in a different way, to what extent might poetry thicken our narrative lives?