Collective Selves: Rethinking Autobiography Beyond the Individual. (NeMLA)
Salve Regina University, New Port Rhode Island
Organization: NeMLA
Event: NeMLA
Collective Selves: Rethinking Autobiography Beyond the Individual.
Philippe Lejeune's influential formulation of the autobiographical pact has long shaped autobiography studies. The pact presumes an aligned author, narrator, and protagonist, and simultaneously privileges the singular, first-person life narrative as the normative autobiographical form. However, several personal narratives resist these assumptions. Edited autobiographies, oral histories, collaborative memoirs, and interview-based narratives often construct an autobiographical "I"/protagonist that is multiple rather than singular and that emerges across the voices of individuals whose experiences collectively narrate a shared history. Likewise, some collective life narratives depart from conventional autobiography structures, appearing as fragmented accounts, interwoven testimonies, or dispersed chapters within larger texts.
This panel invites papers that examine forms of self-representation that foreground the collective. Particularly of interest are papers that interrogate the presumed unity of author, narrator, and protagonist; reconsider the autobiographical pact in light of collaborative and collective forms of narration; and explore how communities write themselves into history through shared acts of remembrance, testimony, and self-representation.
Topics to consider include, but are not limited to:
Collaborative and edited autobiographies
Oral histories and interview-based life narratives
Community and collective testimony
Indigenous, Black, and diasporic collective life writing
Gender, Sexuality and self testaments
Archives, memory, and community self-representation
Theoretical reconsiderations of the autobiographical pact and authorial voice
Experimental and hybrid forms of autobiography
Collective authorship, voice, and narrative authority Life writing, activism, and community formation.
By centering collective modes of self-account, this panel seeks to expand the boundaries of autobiography studies and establish interventions that consider how communities, rather than individuals alone, become autobiographical subjects.
https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22688
titi.aiyegbusi@mail.utoronto.ca
Titilola Aiyegbusi