Identity Technologies

This entry develops a definition of literature as an identity technology by bringing together theories of identity formation as a process of identification and introjection, with thinking about reading as a materially grounded process in which readers encounter identities in the form of characters and narrators. The essay critically situates the terms “identity” and “technology” in the study of literature, media, and culture in order to argue that at the linguistic, symbolic, and material level, literature can be used as a means for inscribing and reinscribing identity at the individual and collective level. Drawing on ways of reading literature from autobiography studies and queer theory, this article is about how to read and think about literature as a mechanism through which identity is formed, negotiated and renegotiated, inscribed, and made public. The case studies utilized in this entry are the opening and closing essays of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s important work of literary theory, Tendencies. Sedgwick’s theorization and enactment of reading as a generative, queer practice is brought together with a close reading of her reflections on her own identity and the variety of techniques she uses to situate to her reader to elucidate the utility of thinking literature as a technology used in the ongoing work of identity.

“It Both Is and Isn’t My Life”

From the perspective of autobiography studies and theory, the musical adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s important graphic memoir Fun Home is a fascinating case study. What of one’s life and experiences can one represent in words and in images? How much “fiction” might creep in given the imprecise nature of memory? How can one sign one’s name as the sole author of one’s life story when the often myriad people surrounding one contributed important pieces within one’s life—when all life writing is in fact relational? How, then, do these questions shift, in what new light can we see them, when an autobiographical text is adapted into another medium, by new writers, and performed nightly by actors? In particular, how does the musical and theatrical performance, experienced collectively, communicate experiences and feelings to an audience differently than does a book that one consumes alone? By comparing particular scenes and songs from the musical with their “source” scenes in Bechdel’s graphic memoir, this chapter will explore these questions paying close attention especially to scenes and strategies in each text that seem to call out for affective response and emotional connection from the audience and the reader.

Rodriguez, Richard

The overwhelming critical attention received by Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982) has eclipsed the complexity and diversity of his work as well as the discussion on his impact on Latina/o studies and autobiography studies. A great deal of bibliography dedicated to Rodriguez is the result of the ideological battles the book was engaged in during the 1980s. The political context in which the book was used (mostly to oppose affirmative action and bilingual education) defined the rest of Rodriguez’s work, as some critics considered his positions on education almost treasonous. Lee Bebout summarizes those reactions in “Postracial Mestizaje: Richard Rodriguez’s Racial Imagination in an America Where Everyone Is Beginning to Melt,” as he mentions how most critics saw Rodriguez’s work as the result of a colonized mind, a mannequin for white America. “Tomas Rivera, Ramon Saldívar, William Nericcio, and others critiqued Rodriguez’s thinking, and sometimes Rodriguez himself, as the result of a colonized mind, blind to history and structural inequalities, and playing the role of a “Mexican” mannequin in the mind of white America.” In an interview with scholar José Antonio Gurpegui in Camino Real, Rodriguez admitted “I do see myself—in some more complicated way—as truly being a traitor to memory, if not exactly a traitor to Mexico or to Latin America. I do think I betrayed my family, betrayed my mother and father by becoming someone new—a ‘gringo.’” If we place his work in this context, Rodriguez’s work brings urgency and new significance to Latina/o studies in the 21st century by highlighting the unresolved contradictions that memory, culture, and identity posit as vehicles of agency. His approach to autobiography redefines traditional notions of identity, race, and language, and offers critical notions of subject formation beyond cultural nationalism, proposing queer paradigms that complicate and challenge writing as a clear vehicle for self-empowerment. His writing, queer to cultural nationalism, is deeply committed to the exploration of autobiography as discontinuous space—a space of disruptive transgression where words are barely a ghostly shell; a floating dream in search of an identity.

Life Writing Research Past and Present: Interview with Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson

On 16 November, 2017, the Austrian “Netzwerk Biographieforschung”,1 a network of life writing scholars and practitioners from various disciplines (history, literary studies, pedagogics, archival work, art, musicology) hosted its twelfth workshop at the University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna. The organisers (Sarah Herbe, Julia Lajta-Novak and Melanie Unseld) were delighted to welcome two very special guests: Prof. Sidonie Smith and Prof. Julia Watson, whose vital contribution to autobiography theory need hardly be explained in the context of this journal. They had been invited on the occasion of the recent publication of Life Writing in the Long Run: A Smith and Watson Autobiography Studies Reader (Maize Books, 2016, available free online), which features a cross-section of their scholarship in the field over three decades. The following is an excerpt from the interview Sarah Herbe and Julia Lajta-Novak conducted with Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, which addressed the differences between autobiographical and biographical modes, recent theoretical interventions in the field of life-writing studies, and topical issues such as the impact of “post-truth” on auto/biography scholars and the implications of the #MeToo movement as a massive autobiographical project. This work was supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) under Grant V543-G23.

Introduction

Arising from a period of intense social upheaval and technological innovation, late 20th-century writers and artists challenge inherited notions of subjectivity and experiment with new hybrid forms of autobiographies composed of both image and text. The introduction provides an overview of how disciplinary boundaries have become more porous, leading to a variety of transdisciplinary visual-verbal self-narrations. The chapter reviews key concerns from Autobiography Studies and Visual Studies and how they redefine image-text relations as a matrix or a network with many surfaces and axes of interaction. The introduction also explains the organization of the book: the work of eight writers-artists–Peter Najarian, Leslie Marmon Silko, Art Spiegelman, Julie Chen, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Carrie Mae Weems, Faith Ringgold, and Edgar Heap of Birds, moving from the most literature-based to the most art-based. In dialogue with historical trauma and its consequences, each author asks crucial questions about American identity.

Picturing Identity

In this book, Hertha D. Sweet Wong examines the intersection of writing and visual art in the autobiographical work of twentieth- and twenty-first-century American writers and artists who employ a mix of written and visual forms of self-narration. Combining approaches from autobiography studies and visual studies, Wong argues that, in grappling with the breakdown of stable definitions of identity and unmediated representation, these writers-artists experiment with hybrid autobiography in image and text to break free of inherited visual-verbal regimes and revise painful histories. These works provide an interart focus for examining the possibilities of self-representation and self-narration, the boundaries of life writing, and the relationship between image and text. Wong considers eight writers-artists, including comic-book author Art Spiegelman; Faith Ringgold, known for her story quilts; and celebrated Indigenous writer Leslie Marmon Silko. Wong shows how her subjects formulate webs of intersubjectivity shaped by historical trauma, geography, race, and gender as they envision new possibilities of selfhood and fresh modes of self-narration in word and image.