Gillian Whitlock – författare

Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran,Marjane Satrapi’s comics, and “Baghdad Blogger” Salam Pax’s Internet diary are just a few examples of the new face of autobiography in an age of migration, globalization, and terror. But while autobiography and other genres of life writing can help us attend to people whose experiences are frequently unseen and unheard, life narratives can also be easily co-opted into propaganda. In Soft Weapons, Gillian Whitlock explores the dynamism and ubiquity of contemporary life writing about the Middle East and shows how these works have been packaged, promoted, and enlisted in Western controversies. Considering recent autoethnographies of Afghan women, refugee testimony from Middle Eastern war zones, Jean Sasson’s bestsellers about the lives of Arab women, Norma Khouri’s fraudulent memoir Honor Lost, personal accounts by journalists reporting the war in Iraq, Satrapi’s Persepolis, Nafisi’s book, and Pax’s blog, Whitlock explores the contradictions and ambiguities in the rapid commodification of life memoirs. Drawing from the fields of literary and cultural studies, Soft Weapons will be essential reading for scholars of life writing and those interested in the exchange of literary culture between Islam and the West.

Life Writing in the Anthropocene is a collection of timely and original approaches to the question of what constitutes a life, how that life is narrated, and what lives matter in autobiography studies in the Anthropocene. This era is characterised by the geoengineering impact of humans, which is shaping the planet’s biophysical systems through the combustion of fossil fuels, production of carbon, unprecedented population growth, and mass extinction. These developments threaten the rights of humans and other-than-humans to just and sustainable lives.

In exploring ways of representing life in the Anthropocene, this work articulates innovative literary forms such as ecobiography (the representation of a human subject''s entwinement with their environment), phytography (writing the lives of plants), and ethological poetics (the study of nonhuman poetic forms), providing scholars and writers with innovative tools to think and write about our strange new world. In particular, its recognition on plant life reminds us of how human lives are entwined with vegetal lives. The creative and critical essays in this book, shaped by a number of Antipodean authors, bear witness to a multitude of lives and deaths.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies.

Life Writing in the Anthropocene is a collection of timely and original approaches to the question of what constitutes a life, how that life is narrated, and what lives matter in autobiography studies in the Anthropocene. This era is characterised by the geoengineering impact of humans, which is shaping the planet’s biophysical systems through the combustion of fossil fuels, production of carbon, unprecedented population growth, and mass extinction. These developments threaten the rights of humans and other-than-humans to just and sustainable lives.

In exploring ways of representing life in the Anthropocene, this work articulates innovative literary forms such as ecobiography (the representation of a human subject''s entwinement with their environment), phytography (writing the lives of plants), and ethological poetics (the study of nonhuman poetic forms), providing scholars and writers with innovative tools to think and write about our strange new world. In particular, its recognition on plant life reminds us of how human lives are entwined with vegetal lives. The creative and critical essays in this book, shaped by a number of Antipodean authors, bear witness to a multitude of lives and deaths.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies.

These chapters gathered from two special issues of the journal Life Writing take up a major theme of recent work in the Humanities: Trauma. Autobiography has had a major role to play in this ‘age of trauma’, and these essays turn to diverse contexts that have received little attention to date: partition narratives in India, Cambodian and Iranian rap, refugee letters from Nauru, graffiti in Tanzania, and the silent spaces of trauma in Chile and Guantanamo. The contexts and media of these autobiographical trauma texts are diverse, yet they are linked by attention to questions of who gets to speak/write/inscribe autobiographically and how and where and why, and how can silences in the wake of traumatic experiences be read. These essays deliberately set out to establish some new fields for research in trauma studies by reaching out to a broader global context, into various texts, media and artifacts, representing diverse histories with specific attention to different voices, bodies, memories and subjectivities. This collection addresses the contemporary circuits of trauma story, and the media and icons and narratives that carry trauma story to political effect and emotional affect.

This book was previously published as two special issues of Life Writing.

These chapters gathered from two special issues of the journal Life Writing take up a major theme of recent work in the Humanities: Trauma. Autobiography has had a major role to play in this ‘age of trauma’, and these essays turn to diverse contexts that have received little attention to date: partition narratives in India, Cambodian and Iranian rap, refugee letters from Nauru, graffiti in Tanzania, and the silent spaces of trauma in Chile and Guantanamo. The contexts and media of these autobiographical trauma texts are diverse, yet they are linked by attention to questions of who gets to speak/write/inscribe autobiographically and how and where and why, and how can silences in the wake of traumatic experiences be read. These essays deliberately set out to establish some new fields for research in trauma studies by reaching out to a broader global context, into various texts, media and artifacts, representing diverse histories with specific attention to different voices, bodies, memories and subjectivities. This collection addresses the contemporary circuits of trauma story, and the media and icons and narratives that carry trauma story to political effect and emotional affect.

This book was previously published as two special issues of Life Writing.