Auto/Biography across the Americas

Transnational Themes in Life Writing

Ricia A. Chansky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317337188
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Auto/biographical narratives of the Americas are marked by the underlying themes of movement and belonging. This collection proposes that the impact of the historic or contemporary movement of peoples to, in, and from the Americas—whether chosen or forced—motivates the ways in which identities are constructed in this contested space. Such movement results in a cyclical quest to belong, and to understand belonging, that reverberates through narratives of the Americas. The volume brings together essays written from diverse national, cultural, linguistic, and disciplinary perspectives to trace these transnational motifs in life writing across the Americas. Drawing on international scholars from the seemingly disparate regions of the Americas—North America, the Caribbean, and Latin America—this book extends critical theories of life writing beyond limiting national boundaries. The scholarship included approaches narrative inquiry from the fields of literature, linguistics, history, art history, sociology, anthropology, political science, pedagogy, gender studies, critical race studies, and indigenous studies. As a whole, this volume advances discourse in auto/biography studies, life writing, and identity studies by locating transnational themes in narratives of the Americas and placing them in international and interdisciplinary conversations.

1 Timescapes, Backpacks, Networks

Writing Lives across the Americas

Sidonie Smith

Abstract

In the context of the inaugural meeting of the International Auto/Biography Association—Chapter of the Americas, I want to explore theories of the transnational. I begin by noting Leela Fernandes’s concern with feminist transnationalism in her essay, “Regimes of Visibility and Transnational Feminist Knowledge.” Fernandes cautions that a regime of visibility that attends only to particular sites of oppression in the conjunction of global formations reproduces a limited geographical imaginary. I link her call for a more expansive and nuanced transnational imaginary anchored in epistemology, ontology, and ethics to recent reconceptualizations of agency that might guide us to observe diverse networks of relationality across the Americas: Rosi Braidotti’s notion of process ontology, Karen Barad’s notion of the agential cut, and Joan Bennett’s notion of the agency of assemblages. I conclude by proposing possible multi-institutional projects that would map, visualize, and analyze the hemispheric cultures of the autobiographical across history, geography, and geopolitics. Such collaborative projects linked to what Fernandes terms an ethics of risk may enable us to discern a denser, richer fabric of autobiographical cultures and to organize our activities beyond the venue of a biennial conference.

En el contexto de la reunión inicial de la IABA de las Américas, voy a explorar las teorías de lo transicional. Empiezo por notar el interés de Leela Fernandes con la transnacionalización feminista en su ensayo “Regimes of Visibility and Transnational Feminist Knowledge.” (Regímenes de visibilidad y conocimiento feminista transnacional). Fernándes aconseja que un régimen de visibilidad que atiende solo a la perspectiva específica de la opresión en conjunto a una formación global reproduce una presentación imaginaria que está limitada geográficamente. Yo ato su llamada a una representación transnacional más extensa y con un matiz enfocado en la epistemología, ontología y ética junto con recientes reconceptualizaciones de las agencias que puedan guiarnos a observar diversas redes de relación en las Américas: la noción de “procesos ontológicos” de Rosi Braidotti, la noción de “corte agencial” de Karen Barad y la noción de “la agencia de ensamblase” de Joan Benett. Concluyo proponiendo un posible proyecto multi-institucional que trazaría un mapa, visualizaría y analizaría las culturas hemisféricas en relación a la autobiografía en la historia, geografía y la geopolítica. Esta colaboración estará unida a lo que presenta Fernández en el término que ella llama el riesgo ético, y como esto nos ayudaría a enriquecer la autobiografía por medio de las culturas y a organizar las actividades para crear una convención bianual.

(Translated by Wanda Ortiz Hernández and Ana Roncero-Bellido)

It was my great pleasure to be at the inaugural meeting of the International Auto/Biography Association (IABA)—Chapter of the Americas, “Auto/Biography across the Americas: Reading beyond Geographic and Cultural Boundaries.” As I mulled over what I would present in San Juan, I asked myself this question: Am I a discrete person, someone located in a large public university in the United States, coming to talk with and hear from other individuals who share a fascination for the genres or the social uses of the acts and practices of life writing? Or by virtue of being in San Juan, at the founding conference, am I resituating myself in a particular geographical imaginary? If the latter, then I needed to think more purposefully about what it means to claim a hemispheric project and establish a network of life-writing scholars, seasoned and emergent, and how such a project might be grounded theoretically. In this chapter, I cannot possibly do justice to the rather daunting theoretical issues at stake in this venture, but I can offer a set of musings, queries, and possibilities for the project ahead.

Part I: Territory and Time Enough

To organize this IABA chapter is to think “the Americas.” This is not a new formation for thinking; scholars of empire, postcolonial conditions, diasporic dispersals, and “new world” slavery have certainly explored complex geographical imaginaries of travel, human trafficking, and travail across North, Central, and South America and the Caribbean islands. In early 2013, the historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto published Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States, reframing the history of the US not as a westward expansion but as a southward extension through a complex and violent project of border-making. Our colleagues in new Pacific Rim studies and in archipelagic studies resituate the Americas from the West, linking communities up and down the Pacific Ocean to the circumnavigations of peoples around the rim and across strings of isles. Trends in the New American Studies are rethinking the US away from its stipulated boundaries in order to illuminate the transnational movements of ideas, books, discourses, peoples, and power. The Caribbean is imagined as at once a number of discrete islands with particular histories, a crossroads of competing empires and their legacies, an extension of European nation states, a concatenation of diasporas, and a locus of lost or subordinated indigeneity. And additional ways of capturing complex imaginaries encompass a landmass extending from the Arctic Circle to Antarctica.

We can lay the Mercator map 90* to the right or 90* to the left, or we can turn it upside down. And we’ll thereby find new routes for these flows, new centripetal suction points. Alternatively, we can follow the weather and environmental events, the volcanic eruptions and hurricane winds that bury things or blow things off route. There can be a surfeit of geographical imaginaries challenging our interpretive modes. Thinking hemispherically requires us to scale territoriality as we theorize mobility across multiple, heterogeneous contact zones; recognize entangled histories of invasion, settler relations, forced transportations, colonization, revolution, imperialism, and globalized neoliberalism; factor in the multiple modernities internal to and differentiating nation states and their shifting economic and political alliances; and track the materialities of technologies that perpetually shift time, space, and social relations.

As we think life writing across the Americas, we might also pause to consider how temporality plays across this territory, at once constituting territory and undoing it. We may want to keep in motion several models of scaling time. One is the time of chronology and linearity; that is, the historical time of modernity, which is sometimes shallow and sometimes deep, attached to place, event, and location. This is time attached to territory as the capture zone of inhabitation and belonging. Across the Americas this is time precolonial and colonial and postcolonial, or time national, transnational, and global.

But there are other kinds of time. Wai Chee Dimock is eloquent on the elasticity of discontinuous time and space with regard to literary artifacts: “Literary space and time are conditional and elastic; their distances can vary, can lengthen or contract, depending on who is reading and what is being read. No mileage can tell us how far one author is from another; no dates can tell us who is close to whom” (174). Published narratives, subsequent editions, and translations can be profligate in their destinies, frequently feral. “With luck,” Dimock observes, “translations will disperse a momentarily assembled group of words, will turn every seemingly bounded text into something far more random, scattered by circumstances across the centuries and across the planet. … Global transit extends, triangulates, and transforms its meaning. This fact alone challenges the power of the territorial as a determining force in literature” (177). Dimock is suspicious of a heightened territorial imaginary, on consciousness, on writers, and on publics. For her the realm of the novel—and here we might substitute the expressive forms of life writing—cannot be so delimited and constrained. The imaginary that joins texts and readers and reading itself is a transnational, transtemporal zone, “mock[ing] the borders of the nation” (178). In this elastic time–space mash-up, our focus would be on groups of words in motion, with the Americas as a possible point of origin and a node in a chaotic transport network linking languages, locations, and uses.

Or we can think of time in Vilashini Cooppan’s terms as “entanglement,” a ganglion of temporal force fields and affective charges at once still and roiling. According to Cooppan, the nesting of pasts, presents, and futures within other pasts, presents, and futures gives time its “palimpsestic quality” (“The Shape”). In other words, moments in time vibrate with time historical and time out of time, or time frozen. Cooppan’s notion of entanglement keeps in play the space–time of the nation and nation state but also recognizes other “alternative spaces to the territorialized nation state.” And here is her suggestive list: “the multiethnic cosmopolitan crossroads, the transnational ethnic imaginary, the regional bloc, the world-system, the network, the new social movements based in identities that cross national borders (green, antiglobalization, feminist, queer), others grounded in the local, and, of course, the ubiquitous global sensibility” (Worlds Within, 2). These alternatives are other “cuts” to the imaginary of belonging and rupture across spatial and temporal distances.

There is yet a fourth dimension of hemispheric time—the long geological time of the continent itself. This is the time that Rosanne Kennedy so provocatively illuminates in “Humanity’s Footprint: Reading Rings of Saturn and Palestinian Walks in an Anthropocene Era.” Kennedy reads the autobiographical alongside concepts of the Anthropocene to foreground the imbrication of the human as fully “embedded in the natural and physical world” (171). This is the time of “humanity’s footprint on the environment” (172).

Theorizing multiple territorialities and multiple temporalities in the context of a hemispheric project productively nuances our approaches to life writing across the Americas. Let’s stipulate the considerable traffic in life writing, to invoke Gillian Whitlock’s phrasing, traffic moving northward and southward, from west to east and east to west, across the Americas; traffic moving in from points around the Pacific and the Atlantic. Let’s stipulate the complex autobiographical legacies and “genealogical accountings” (Quayson) that flow to the present from centuries in the past, via oral storytelling and Mayan hieroglyphs; codices and histories; conversion narratives and photographs; fiction and documentary films; comics and selfies. Carrying experiential histories along public access routes, this traffic involves at once a distribution of discrete nodes and a seamless stream. It joins acts of life writing, texts of life writing, multiple media for its conceptualization and production, economies and technologies of circulation, cultures of reception, scenes of interpretation, specific readers and larger communities of reading. It traffics as commodity, social capital, lifeline, inheritance, documentation, witnessing. This traffic does time, marks time, reorganizes time, and succumbs to time. This great landmass is replete with life writing and “autobiographical cultures” sedimented with histories, dense with multiple temporalities, refulgent with place, explosive with affect, parasitic, adapting, and symbiotic, creolized and hybridized.

Part II: An Exhibit of Material Prints on the Land

Considering these issues prompted me to think again about a powerful exhibition capturing issues of a transnational imaginary, material footprints on the land, and acts of personal witness to lives and life stories of “those who do not write,” to invoke Philippe Lejeune’s expansive phrase (185). Let’s journey to the Sonoran Desert, which constitutes much of southwestern Arizona and northern Sonora, Mexico. It is a vast and rugged desert cut by the national border between the US and Mexico, a border that cuts through the desires and destinies of so many undocumented migrants.

Let me begin with some background information. In 1995, the US government instituted the Prevention through Deterrence (PTD) program, aimed at stopping the traffic of undocumented migrants up from Mexico and Central and South America into the US. Government agents calculated that massing agents and building the fence along the most-traveled parts of the border in California, Texas, and New Mexico would deter undocumented migrants from attempting the crossing. They calculated as well that the dangers of transit through the rugged Sonoran Desert in southern Arizona would deter migrants from crossing through that part of the border. Instead, migrants unable to cross elsewhere began converging at the border in the Sonoran Desert, where they confronted harsh extremes of heat, a vast stretch of inhospitable land, and the constant threat of violence at the hands of coyotes (human traffickers), drug smugglers, and thieves. Many of the migrants crossing the Sonoran Desert are unsuccessful in their attempt to enter the country; government figures indicate that approximately 330 undocumented migrants are apprehended south of Tucson every day and deported back across the Mexican border. Others are successful.

Still other undocumented migrants do not survive the crossing. Fifteen years after PTD went into effect, Chad C. Haddal, in a 2010 Research Service Report to Congress, wrote: “the evidence suggests that border crossings have become more hazardous since the ‘Prevention through Deterrence’ policy went into effect in 1995, resulting in an increase in illegal migrant deaths along the Southwest border” (quoted in De Léon, Krugliak, and Barnes). In this transnational desert, geological formations and state violence render the lives of those crossing into the US fearful, dogged, tenuous, and deadly.

In January 2013, the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan mounted an exhibit titled State of Exception; the phrase was adopted from Giorgio Agemben’s term for state suspension of political and civil rights in the face of threats to the nation state. The installation brought the work of University of Michigan anthropologist Jason De Léon and his Undocumented Migrant Project (UMP) to the campus community. Through the UMP, launched in 2009, De Léon and his students document the “unauthorized border crossings” taking place in the Sonoran Desert. A conjunction of ethnographic and archaeological methods, the project seeks to comprehend and archive the energy, hopefulness, violence, suffering, and deadliness of the undocumented migrant experience in this inhospitable borderland. De Léon and his students spend summers gathering, archiving, and mapping the material culture left behind on the desert surface—a virtual trove of over 10,000 “microfacts,” including zippers, buttons, food cans, cosmetics, drink containers, pieces of clothing, and the ubiquitous backpacks, some intact, some in pieces.

Keep this figure in mind. This is from De Léon’s catalog essay. “Since 2000,” he writes,

approximately five million people have been apprehended trying to cross in southern Arizona and conservative estimates tally the number of migrant deaths at 2500. It is impossible to know how many have actually died during this process given that many bodies go unrecovered because of the remote location where people often expire, the rapid rate at which bodies decompose in the desert, and the lack of any concerted effort on the part of the federal government to recover the corpses of these non-U.S. citizens.

(De Léon, Krugliak, and Barnes)

In producing State of Exception, De Léon was joined by Institute for the Humanities curator Amanda Krugliak and New York photographer Richard Barnes. The three collaborators worked to find an exhibition architecture and display ethic of “modest” witnessing (Haraway) adequate to engaging the discarded artifacts collected by De Léon and his students in the Sonoran Desert south of Tucson. The gallery of the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan is a modest-sized room. For this exhibit, a partial wall was constructed to mark off an entryway into the exhibit. Here’s what visitors encountered as they walked through the door. They found themselves in a hallway about 8 feet long and 2 1/2 feet wide. The walls were unadorned, white. The light remained dim, flickering. It was the floor that caught the eye, riveting one’s attention. On it, Barnes projected a looped video of the desert floor covered with the objects that migrants left behind as they walked through the nights and days. Visitors walked along a pathway composed of discarded clothes and backpacks, plastic water bottles and hairclips, jewelry and religious objects—all registering the passage of countless undocumented migrants making their way from the border through the desert and on to Tucson and parts beyond. In other words, you, the visitor, moved as if transported to the desert and as if you were walking in the shoes of the undocumented across the evidence of their aspirations, their unknown future, their struggle for survival, their possible detention and return, their possible death.

Moving into the room proper, visitors confronted the overwhelming evidence of the many journeys made across the desert floor. An entire wall and a half was covered with row upon row of backpacks recovered during summer field trips. These walls represented but a sampling of the material culture of things migrants carried that resides in De Léon’s storage sites of this Sonoran “dig,” all as meticulously registered as in an archaeological dig. In addition to the wall and a half of floor-to-ceiling backpacks, the room contained two display cases of artifacts. On the other side of the half wall with backpacks, Barnes projected a composite video display of six people talking to the camera. De Léon and five students offer their secondary witnessing to the stories of the undocumented. They also give witness to their own experience of digging for the undocumented. These testimonies play on a continuous loop. On two other walls, video projections run on loops, one camera moving along a border fence and another along a desert road at nighttime.

This installation, including its brochure, is an assemblage of multiple and heterogeneous testimonies, human and nonhuman, documenting the lives of the undocumented who passed through the Sonoran Desert in the last decades. Jason speaks to the camera, witnessing to his experience as an ethnograp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Reading beyond Borders—Movement and Belonging in the Americas
• 1 Timescapes, Backpacks, Networks: Writing Lives across the Americas
• 2 Art, Identity, and Narration: Autobiographical Quests beyond National Limits
• 3 A Transnational Autobiographical Pact: The Canada Reads 2012 Controversy
• 4 Between Nations, Between Selves: Intertextuality and Diasporic Identity in Jamaica Kincaid’s Among Flowers
• 5 Talking beyond Borders: Oral Histories of Becoming Politically Left in Latin America, 1960–1990
• 6 The Mediated Self in the Contested Domain of Caribbean Autobiography
• 7 Mapping out a Treacherous Terrain: Working at the Crossroads of Autobiographical Studies and Inter-American Literary Studies
• 8 Decolonial Translation in Embodied Auto/Biographical Indigenous Performance: Monique Mojica’s Chocolate Woman Dreams the Milky Way
• 9 “See How I Talk about the Slavemaster”: Searching for “We” in Afro-Curaçaoan Oral Histories
• 10 Class and Class Awareness in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
• 11 The Paradoxical Demand for Realism: Building National Identity in Brazilian Literatures
• 12 “Forward!”: National Identity, Animalographies, and the Ethics of Representation in the Posthuman Imaginary
• List of Contributors
• Index