Life Narrative

This article investigates the significance of Kazuko Kuramoto’s Manchurian Legacy: Memoirs of a Japanese Colonist (1999) as a life narrative that foregrounds the biopolitical implications of modern subjectivity in the context of the global system of nation states. Using the theoretical insights of, primarily, Giorgio Agamben, Carl Schmitt, and Georg Simmel, I argue that Kuramoto’s record of her own experience between Manchuria, Japan, and the United States, showcases the fundamental conflict between the nation and the family as the largest and smallest social circles vying for the individual’s allegiance. This discussion will show that the nation-state’s claim is preeminent and that the political is fundamental to the construction of a viable subjectivity in the modern world, leaving complete exclusion as the only alternative.

As an upshot of 9/11, the Western literary market has been witnessing a proliferation in life narratives by and about Muslim women. Almost all of these narratives focus on Islam, a patriarchal society, and the state's oppression of women. These diasporic Muslim women authors take the Western readers into a journey of unseen and unheard events of their private lives. Their narratives are usually replete with generalizations, exaggerations, stereotypes and reductive images to support and justify the imperial presence and hegemony project in the Middle East. By drawing upon Hamid Naficy's 'here and there' of exile culture, I argue that the second generation Muslim diaspora masters multiple cultural repertoires that can be cherry-picked in response to the stereotypes. They can challenge and reverse the Oriental stereotypes through their creative works. By studying Amin Palangi's 'Waking with Martyrs,' I will demonstrate how this Iranian Muslim in exile demystifies the images of Muslims and creates a better sentiment towards Iranian and Muslims in general.

O my country and my home, I pray I never lack a city, never face a hopeless life one filled with misery and pain. Before that comes, let death, my death, deliver me, bring my days to their fatal end. For there's no affliction worse than losing one's own country. Chorus, from Euripides's Medea 1 Manchurian Legacy: Memoirs of a Japanese Colonist (1999) is the English-language memoir of Kazuko Kuramoto, a woman of Japanese ancestry born in colonial Manchuria in 1927, who was forcefully repatriated after the collapse of the Japanese empire in the Second World War. Repatriation began a trying time of adjusting to harsh postwar conditions in a homeland Kuramoto found, in many ways, foreign and inhospitable. Eventually, she set out to acquire US citizenship, thereby embracing a new national identity that appeared to function on a voluntaristic rather than an ethnic basis. This voluntaristic element is crucial in granting Kuramoto access to the naturalization that postcolonial China could not concede, especially to a daughter of former colonial masters. The biopolitical relevance of this memoir, I argue, emerges from each radical change in Kuramoto's circumstances marking a fracture in her relation with a sovereign state entity, beginning with the loss of her colonial identity as a Japanese citizen in Manchuria, and culminating The State You're In: Citizenship, Sovereign Power, and The (Political) Rescue...

As an upshot of 9/11, the Western literary market has been witnessing a proliferation in life narratives by and about Muslim women. Almost all of these narratives focus on Islam, a patriarchal society, and the state's oppression of women. These diasporic Muslim women authors take the Western readers into a journey of unseen and unheard events of their private lives. Their narratives are usually replete with generalizations, exaggerations, stereotypes and reductive images to support and justify the imperial presence and hegemony project in the Middle East. By drawing upon Hamid Naficy's 'here and there' of exile culture, I argue that the second generation Muslim diaspora masters multiple cultural repertoires that can be cherry-picked in response to the stereotypes. They can challenge and reverse the Oriental stereotypes through their creative works. By studying Amin Palangi's 'Waking with Martyrs,' I will demonstrate how this Iranian Muslim in exile demystifies the images of Muslims and creates a better sentiment towards Iranian and Muslims in general.

In this article, the author presents research that explores individual and collective autobiographical acts aiming at the creation of places of enunciation for decolonial selves through practices in the visual arts. This practice-based research benefits from interdisciplinary crossings between feminist geography, life writing, and decoloniality, through which the author designed the network of concepts that gave form to the epistemological approach to practice and research used. The first stage of the practice is a self-reflective response to personal experiences within geographical displacement and dislocation in language. The second part comprises collective writing processes conducted with twelve Brazilian women who live in London. Writing is a cross-element in this practice-based research, and visual arts offer a space for exploring decolonial acts. Thus, the author sought in decoloniality a path to offer a contribution to knowledge by proposing decolonial strategies for writing life narratives within displacement through translanguaging and autobiogeography.

This article shares some of my doctoral experiences in a practice-based PhD research in arts developed at the Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London. It locates art practice within the academic research realm and contributes to researchers working on autobiographical studies and practice-based research methods. By offering an overview on my research topic focusing on the relationship between language and place in the life of Brazilian women living in London, I reflect on the relevance of “not-knowing” as a fruitful space for researching autobiographical and situated life narratives through art practice. The article concludes that qualitative methods are relevant for building passages from the individual to the collective sphere of an art practice developed within geographical displacement and in the context of academic research.

The paper offers a formalist-ethical reading of _The Unfinished Memoirs_ (2012) and _Prison Diaries_ (2017), two life narratives by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (1920-1975), an iconic Bangladeshi politician and statesman, deemed the Father of the Bangalee nation and popularly known as Bangabandhu, the Friend of Bengal. The paper aspires to underscore the performative and transformative ways the ‘observing self’ in a life narrative recalls and reconstructs the ‘observed self’ and the ‘observed others’.   
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The paper unfolds in two core chapters. The first chapter, “The Poetics and Politics of Life Narrative,” offers in two sections a formalist reading of the two said narratives. Referencing the generic differences between autobiography and memoir and that between diary and chronicle, the first section explores if and how Sheikh Mujib’s life narratives accommodate the aspects of relational autobiography (Smith and Watson) and political memoir (Egerton). The second section addresses the questions of fact and fictionality, of the mythic-mermorializing operations of forgetting and remembering that a life narrative attends to. It explores the ways the said life narratives accommodate ‘lived’ memory (re-experiencing by writing) and ‘artificial’ memory (recalling insights, not simply raw information), a combination that helps one give voice to the clandestine and offer a chronicle of contemporary history. The second chapter, “The Ethics of Life Narrative,” offers an ethical reading of the two narratives. Differentiating morality (restrictive) from ethics (responsible), the paper conceives of ethics as a set of decision-making tools that are other-oriented. Gathering insights from ‘alterity’ (Levinas) and ‘ethicity’ (Harpham) of Ethical Criticism, this chapter in two sections concentrates on one’s response to and response-ability for the ‘internal’ and the ‘external’ others. The title of the first section, “‘As a man, what concerns mankind concerns me’: Intertextuality and Interpersonality,” alludes to the first sentence of Sheikh Mujib’s famous statement (3 May 1973) that has its resonance in, say, Terence’s Heauton Timorumenos and Bhagat Singh’s Jail Notebook. The section isolates in the two life narratives the elements of intertextuality that are tantamount to interpersonality as interpretive tools to read the narrator’s selving of one’s own vis-à-vis the other. Referencing the second sentence of the said statement, the second section is entitled, “‘As a Bengalee, I am deeply involved in all that concerns Bengalees’: The Self-Other Interanimation.” It explores how personalized memory employs both ‘retention’ and ‘invention’ mechanisms to form personal, collective, national, and human identities and histories.
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The title of the paper commingles the two selves – “a man” and “a Bengalee” – with a view to foregrounding its emancipatory potential apropos of Tagore’s conceptualization of nationalism and that of vishva (worlding). The paper thus explores how a life narrative charts the multiple personae of the observing subject and enables the subject to reconstruct and reconnect with others without conceding individual agency.