¡®Life
writing and the Generations¡¯ 15-19 July 2002, La Trobe
University, Melbourne, Australia
Report
by Margaretta Jolly (University of Exeter)
The theme
of generations was an inspired one as the focus for this
gathering of life writing scholars, practitioners and activists.
Lying at the heart of so much life writing and certainly
prominent in the contemporary memoir boom it had not yet
been treated to a major conference, especially one of such
international scope. Papers treated classic mother/father-daughter/son
struggles from canonical life writing (Rousseau, Goethe,
Svevo, Darwin, Nabokov, Woolf, Stein et al) to contemporary
(Martin Amis, Lorna Sage, Paul Auster, Wayson Choy, Eva
Hoffman, Lisa Appignaesi, Robert Dessaix, Dorothy Allison,
Hong Ying, Moshe Shamir amongst others). Generational conflicts
were viewed through prisms of shame, assimilation in diasporic,
race and class contexts, transgenerational transmissions
of trauma, therapeutic practice and detective work. Especially
interesting was Tom Couser¡¯s sensitive discussion of parental
narratives of euthanasia and disability, focused through
a recent father¡¯s memoir about deciding to kill his paraplegic
son and Maggie Kirman¡¯s exploration of donor conception
and identity in narratives from donors and recipients of
Artificial Insemination. Several speakers used their own
histories to think through inheritance, including Jewish-Australian
refugee histories, Australian Aboriginal pasts, memories
of a Chinese family in 1950s Hong Kong and of migration
from Eastern Europe.
If much auto/biography puzzles over relationships of inheritance
and descent, intergenerational relationships also often
drive the turn to writing, story-telling or video memoir
in the first place. Many speakers reflected on generation
as an aspect of the creative process in both oral and written
narratology. Topics included genre blurring in Drusilla
Modjeska ¡¯s writing, obituaries as auto/biographies, netography,
fictional truth in stories in the Melbourne Jewish Holocaust
Centre, video memoir and video biography, Victorian women¡¯s
collective biography and hagiography, feminist letters between
mothers and daughters and Mexican-American relational autobiography.
Julie Ward showed delightful slides of a life-story project
that developed reminiscence work with elderly Sunderland
residents through writing their memories on household objects
while Odine de Guzman explored the collaborative writing
of a young researcher and 60-year-old women in the Philippines.
Generation was equally fruitful as a political concept.
Most obviously pertinent was the question of the Australian
Stolen Generation. Here intergenerational transmission took
tragic form as the forced interruption of cultural and familial
memory. Mick Dodson, a member of the Yawuru peoples and
a prominent advocate on land rights as Australia¡¯s first
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner
gave a moving keynote speech about the pain inflicted on
the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
children from their families throughout the last century
as part of white racist assimilation policy. His discussion
of the importance of personal testimony not only in individual
healing but for political relations with Australian government
found echo in several discussions of testimony in South
African, Chinese, Jewish and other contexts. Biography also
focused questions of race relations. Alison Ravenscroft,
who worked with Jackie and Rita Huggins in producing a recent
Australian Aboriginal auto/biography Auntie Rita, asked
us to think of the white contexts within books are conceived,
edited, published and promoted. Penny Van Toorn described
relearning reading in editing early Aboriginal life writings,
while Melinda Hinkson told of the challenge of writing the
biography of W.E.H. Stanmer, anthropologist best known for
his respectful interpretations of the Aboriginal Dreaming.
Sidonie Smith¡¯s riveting plenary ¡®Personal Narrative in
the time of Human Rights: ¡®grandmothers¡¯ telling stories
of sexual servitude in World War II¡¯ set the framework
for where much work on testimony is going. Analysing the
way that Korean/Japanese women who survived ¡®sexual slavery¡¯
under the Japanese military in the 1930s and 40s are now
testifying in many international fora including the United
Nations Human Rights Commission, Smith argued that their
life narratives powerfully challenge gendered and national
notions of shame and silence. Asking why these kinds of
stories have begun to circulate in the last decade, especially
in the case of long-silenced ¡®Comfort Women¡¯, she showed
the facilitating power of new human rights discourses especially
in relation to war crimes, transnational feminism and the
changing structures of geo-political memory. But Smith offered
some cautionary notes in the embrace of life narratives
as political advocacy. Testifiers can become hostage to
an ur-narrative in which they are cast as perpetual victim
and can suffer in being asked to ¡®perform¡¯ trauma repeatedly.
These stories can also perpetuate structures of shame and
honour in the asking for absolution and too easily become
commodified in ways that obstruct the very empathetic response
being sought. And in the tendency to homogenisation, testimonies
that foreground one arena of trauma, in this case sexual
abuse, can occlude other social determinants. For example
few of these women¡¯s stories addressed the class contexts
that often lay behind parents¡¯ willingness to give their
daughters to the military in the first place.
In the inter-disciplinary and politicised temper of many
papers, keynote speaker Charles Altieri provided a striking
note of dissonance as he pleaded for a separation between
¡®aesthetics¡¯ and ¡®ethics¡¯ even in such a highly engaged
genre. His suggested alternative criteria for analysing
autobiography were seductive: How is the agent moved by
particular causes? How does being moved modify the agent¡¯s
sense of the world? How does this bring will into play?
In pursuing such questions Altieri celebrated self-portraiture
such as Rembrandt¡¯s or poets like Lowell who chronicle
their sensual and intellectual process in the world without
idealisation. In some ways Altieri¡¯s challenge to contemporary
auto/biography theorists as priestly puritans echoed the
culture wars of US academia and left little room for discussing
the reader as well as the (privileged genius) writer, or
any of the ways in which life history has always been socially
as much as aesthetically important. However he himself represented
a generational voice that awakened memories of poetry and
pleasure alongside heated discussion.
An evening of readings by Australian life writers and a
witty keynote by Don Watson, the speech-writer for and biographer
of Australia¡¯s maverick prime minister Paul Keating, amplified
the sense that the academic discussion is part of a very
real and very popular culture of life writing in Australia
as elsewhere. As a whole the conference focused attention
on Australian research and its driving themes of Aboriginal
and migration histories. Organised by Richard Freadman,
director of the Unit for Studies in Biography and Autobiography
at La Trobe University, with the help of Trish Dutton, it
was the third in a series associated with the International
Association for Auto/Biography. The IABA is an affiliation
that aims to promote international links in the field. To
join its listserve contact the moderator Craig Howes on
craighow@hawaii.edu.
The next conference will be organised by David Parker at
the Chinese University, Hong Kong in March 2004 and will
build on links made at previous conferences in Beijing and
Vancouver. Titled ¡®Inhabiting Multiple Worlds: Auto/Biography
in an Anti/Global Age¡¯, this forthcoming conference hopes
to offer multi-lingual workshops as well as a postgraduate
day with leaders in the field.
(Published
in Auto/Biography: A Journal of the British Sociological
Association, edited by Andrew Sparkes, University of
Exeter.)
For full
details of who spoke on what in Melbourne, see
http://www.latrobe.edu.au/www/english/usba/usba.html
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