Experimentation and theorising on forms of life writing from the field of history has grown substantially in recent decades, as historians understand how autobiographical narrative may contribute to understanding both the past and our processes of accessing it. The introduction to this special issue on `History and Autobiography¿ outlines some theoretical debates emerging from the intersection of history with different forms of self-representation, and highlights some of the main points examined by the contributors. Some contributors explore the convergence of history and life writing through an autobiographical voice, while others work theoretically or critically. Beyond these different approaches, all the essays explore to what extent autobiography serves historical writing and comprehension, and examine the theoretical and practical consequences of this convergence.

Focusing on Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being, this essay engages the transits between the fictional and the autobiographical by deploying notions from narratology, including a proposal regarding the difference between 'fiction' and 'the fictive' reflections on metatextual performance, and the idea of the implied author.

This essay focuses on a recent Asian diasporic auto/biographical graphic narrative that uses family stories to mediate history: Gia-Bao Tran's (Tran GB. 2010.Vietnamerica: A Family's Journey. New York: Villard). Because of the cultural implications of the Vietnam War, particularly the ways stories about it have been constructed, visualized, inherited, consumed, and challenged in the USA, I argue that a life narrative such asVietnamericaintervenes in the contemporary production of memory and the forms contemporary historical writing might take. Tran very consciously places himself within the narrative and shows how historical events become catalysts for the ways a subject evolves and might be represented, with emphasis on the embodiment of the subject, memory, and, strategically, emotions. He thus multiplies his text's discursive possibilities by requiring readers to read beyond the narrated, toward the embodied ¿ physically and emotively.Vietnamerica, therefore, is not a mere recounting of past events, but a representation and a performance of how events were experienced, how they are remembered and even re-experienced, through emotions, in the present

The article presents a film criticism for the 2003 documentary motion picture "My Architect" directed by Nathanial Kahn and the 2010 documentary "My Father, Pablo Escobar" directed by Nicolás Entel. Topics discussed include filial memory and love in these motion pictures for fathers who have been lost, Sebastián Marroquín, the son of Columbia drug lord Pablo Escobar, and the work of G. Thomas Couser

On 23 July 23 1901, a group of 530 schoolteachers (365 men and 165 women) left San Francisco on the USS.Thomas, travelling to Manila on a very specific mission: establish a public school system based on the American model in the United States' new colonial possession. Framed within President McKinley's 1899 pronouncement, after the Spanish-American War of 1989, that `there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipino, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them¿, the American government, rather than rule its new colony primarily through its military presence, chose to educate its subjects, enacting a problematic civilisational strategy that would have lasting effects on Philippine culture and identity. The teachers on that ship are collectively known to history as the `Thomasites¿. Views about the Thomasites have shifted dramatically over the twentieth century¿they have been described as selfless educators committed to uplifting the `little brown brother¿, and censured for their leading role in American imperialism. Most of the scholarship, however, tends to engage the history of the Thomasites from accounts of their work and from the perspective of education theory. My interest lies in Thomasite life writing and what these texts tell us about their views about their role in America's imperial project, in the context of postcolonial critiques against them. By reading some extant examples of teachers' life writing, I consider their evolving personal views on their educational mission and their role in America's colonial project. Specifically, I will examine John D. DeHuff's unpublished autobiography,Memoirs of Orient Seas, to discuss the ways his perspective on America's colonial educational policies were likely shaped by his experience in the Philippines. Crucially, I want to explore whether the time in which the memoirs were written and/or revised informs us about the ways the Thomasites envisioned themselves and their role in the colonial project. In the case of John DeHuff, I argue that there is evidence that his ideas about his participation in the project evolved in important ways, leading him to challenge the United States government's pedagogical policies in the Santa Fe Indian School, where he worked for several years after returning from the Philippines, and rethink his role as a Thomasite

Young Adult (YA) dystopian fiction blends the traditional developmental narrative with a heightened concern with issues regarding the individual against society, often in the context of a post-apocalyptic world. In this article, I examine the way Lois Lowry's The Giver (1993) and Lauren Oliver's Delirium (2011) focus on the state's regulation over or removal of their people's emotions and decisions in the context of the representation of future societies. If we consider the place of emotions in YA literature in general, with its interest in adolescents' interaction with their families, each other, their school, or other communities, we can accept the validity of emotions as a prism through which to examine the text's didactic and social purposes. Specifically, by deploying a discourse that emphasizes the dangerous consequences of unbridled emotions in earlier historical times, dystopian texts ask us to think about the political potential of feelings as catalysts for social change

This book studies the transnational nature of American cultural production, specifically literature, film, and music, examining how these serve as ways of perceiving the United States and American culture. The volume's engagement with the reality of transnationalism focuses on material examples that allow for an exploration of concrete manifestations of this phenomenon and trace its development within and outside the United States. Contributors consider the ways in which artifacts or manifestations of American culture have traveled and what has happened to the texts in the process, inviting readers to examine the nature of the transnational turn by highlighting the cultural products that represent and produce it. Emphasis on literature, film, and music allows for nuanced perspectives on the way a global phenomenon is enacted in American texts within the U.S, also illustrating the commodification of American culture as these texts travel. The volume therefore serves as a coherent examination of the critical and creative repercussions of transnationalism, and, by juxtaposing a discussion of creativity with critical paradigms, unveils how transnationalism has become one of the constitutive modes of cultural production in the 21st century

Relative Histories focuses on the Asian American memoir that specifically recounts the story of at least three generations of the same family. This form of auto/biography concentrates as much on other members of one¿s family as on oneself, generally collapses the boundaries conventionally established between biography and autobiography, and in many cases¿as Rocío G. Davis proposes for the auto/biographies of ethnic writers¿crosses the frontier into history, promoting collective memory. Davis centers on how Asian American family memoirs expand the limits and function of life writing by reclaiming history and promoting community cohesion. She argues that identity is shaped by not only the stories we have been told, but also the stories we tell, making these narratives important examples of the ways we remember our family¿s past and tell our community¿s story. In the context of auto/biographical writing or filmmaking that explores specific ethnic experiences of diaspora, assimilation, and integration, this work considers two important aspects: These texts re-imagine the past by creating a work that exists both in history and as a historical document, making the creative process a form of re-enactment of the past itself. Each chapter centers on a thematic concern germane to the Asian American experience: the narrative of twentieth-century Asian wars and revolutions, which has become the subtext of a significant number of Asian American family memoirs (Pang-Mei Natasha Chang¿s Bound Feet and Western Dress, May-lee and Winberg Chai¿s The Girl from Purple Mountain, K. Connie Kang¿s Home Was The Land of Morning Calm, Doung Van Mai Elliott¿s The Sacred Willow); family experiences of travel and displacement within Asia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which unveil a history of multiple diasporas that are often elided after families immigrate to the United States (Helie Lee¿s Still Life With Rice, Jael Silliman¿s Jewish Portraits, Indian Frames, Mira Kamdar¿s Motiba¿s Tattoos); and the development of Chinatowns as family spaces (Maxine Hong Kingston¿s China Men, Lisa See¿s On Gold Mountain, Bruce Edward Hall¿s Tea that Burns). The final chapter analyzes the discursive possibilities of the filmed family memoir ("family portrait documentary"), examining Lise Yasui¿s A Family Gathering, Ruth Ozeki Lounsbury¿s Halving the Bones, and Ann Marie Fleming¿s The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam. Davis concludes the work with a metaliterary engagement with the history of her own Asian diasporic family as she demonstrates the profound interconnection between forms of life writing