2010 Sussex, United Kingdom

Conference Report

by Jesse Field

Many thanks to Margaretta Jolly and Sam Carroll for extending all of us a warm welcome to IABA 2010 at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK. For this dissertation-writing graduate student, IABA 2010 offered an inspiring — if at times jarring — impact on work in progress. The sheer size and scope of the conference defies any effort at a complete or even representative report, and so I will restrict myself to remarks on keynote speeches and panel talks that I actually saw and heard. Further, I will focus my comments on the most contentious conversations that I heard, conversations which reveal continuing uncertainties lurking beneath the floorboards of our field, as well is in our own careers as critics, writers, feminists, and citizens of the world.

Nancy K. Miller set the tone for all of us who write memoir criticism in her opening keynote address, “My Body, My Biography: Against Recovery.” Miller avows that the recovery narrative, which has penetrated the book market and is now taken up in advertising campaigns is far too obligatory a form, too focused on the potential for self-transformation, and implicitly taking the recovery story to be equivalent to recovery. Leigh Gilmore very much concurs in her own talk. Like Miller, Gilmore takes pains to profile storytellers like the clown David Shiner who fail at obligatory form, but who discover as Quentin Crisp did, that “failure may be your style.” Indeed, says Gilmore, the failure to live up to one or the two available gender formations dominant in world culture has lately inspired some of the best “fail” narratives.

The panel “Intimate Lives in Public Places” pushes this challenge to narrative arcs to its logical end: can a self speak and yet fail entirely to even tell a story? Louise Yelin examines the autobiographical video clips of Amikam Toren’s Carrots to find a model of overcoming alienation and locating new possibilities for empathy in memories of brief, chance encounters between the artist and strangers in the public sphere. Bella Brodzki examines the extreme graphic subjectivity offered up by Art Spiegelman in Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*! Spiegelman’s identity merges with the motif of drawing, making formal and psychic disintegrations happen in parallel. Julia Watson also examines how an artist grapples with the fused impulses to draw and express the self in the work of Bobby Baker, who has documented her experience of a course of treatment for psychosis in drawings that have subsequently been modified and exhibited in museums. Watson’s presentation on Baker’s art drew much discussion, particularly regarding just how we are to interpret Baker’s multiple mediations of her course of treatment, and her ultimate renewal of psyche with the revelation that she had cancer. Baker gives it that her “cure” was in fact cancer. Nancy K. Miller offered, “Cancer: it’s good for depression.”

The above critics show the moment we are in as scholars engaged with the ongoing expansion of life stories in every conceivable artistic arena. At the risk of seeming retrograde, Professor Meg Jensen engages directly with writers who write in such hum-drum forms as the novel and the memoir. Jensen’s enthralling discussion of J. G. Ballard’s expository work on his own Empire of the Sun hints at the way a storyteller may find the “essential truths” of his or her memories in fiction rather than in memoir pe se. Following, Jensen’s discussion with Blake Morrison and Rachel Cusk focused on what a writer might consider the biggest difference between fiction and memoir. Unsurprisingly, for these talented and experienced storytellers, the forms have many similarities – Morrison’s reading from a poem, a novel, and a memoir of his, for example, all showed uncannily similar crafting of the very same motif, that of competition between one man and another. For both Morrison and Cusk, the memoir distinguishes itself as a kind work that can “go bad.” It can become painful for them to revisit in a way that their fiction or poetry never seems to do. Throughout these discussions, the tension between truth-telling and story-telling is palpable, and apparently irresolvable. Perhaps the greatest lesson the writer teaches is to plunge forward to complete what it is that asserts itself as a vision in the mind, and damn the consequences, be they alienation from old friends or even settlement on charges of libel.

Morrison and Cusk remind us that the writer quite often puts social and ethical concerns quite to the side of the needs of art. Feminism and other critical practices that take social consciousness-raising as their end cannot take the same stance. Much discussion throughout the conference on feminist thought and practice showed that an international feminist approach to life writing is still a work in progress, littered with unexpected ethical pitfalls. Professor Kay Schaffer, who works collaboratively with Professor Song Xianlin to study contemporary women’s writing from China, was candid about the inability of Western feminism to predict or describe the success of works like Chen Danyan’s three biographies of bourgeois Shanghai ladies, with their celebration of pre-Communist Chinese gender frameworks. In a later panel, Katja Kurz described with approval how Waris Dirie’s Desert Flower was able to gain American condemnation for the practice of female genital mutilation, but Prof. Schaffer objected that Desert Flower had a demonstrably deleterious effect on local African efforts to gradually reform the institutions that practice female genital “modification” (the moniker “mutilation” exposing for Schaffer the demonization taking place here).

This last point raises one of the most difficult problems within feminism (and indeed, in all other practices of advocacy as well): how do we balance our interest in global consciousness-raising with the need to attend to the circumstances of the local? Professor Nadje Al-Ali’s keynote “Writing Iraqi Women’s Lives: Trauma, Memory and Identity” speaks to the fierce urgency of this issue. Prof. Al-Ali’s presentation reveals the effects on amnesia on the female subjectivity and ethnic identity. When she shows us photos of parading bands of extremist Shi’ite women, dressed in dark, foreboding robes, for example, Al-Ali explains that such a phenomenon was previously unknown in Baghdad, and that its occurrence is strictly post-2004. She describes briefly how Iraq’s history reveals many different female subjectivities which may be able to offer something to a population still traumatized by violence every day. Al-Ali’s presentation reveals the perplexity of a witness who serves as both scholar and advocate. Al-Ali was openly negative about the prospects of using the concept of “intimate publics” to describe a situation of near-total breakdown of the public sphere. Her impression of American theory is clearly colored by the fact of the invasion itself, as well as the efforts of international human rights organizations to build new subjects in Iraq and other catastrophically traumatized places. In all cases, Al-Ali feels, not enough attention is paid to the facts on the ground.

Balance between global and local is also required in environmental advocacy. The panel “Ecocritical life writings across cultures” opens up the exciting possibility that our field of life writing may be a crucial component of successful ecocritical strategies. In the field of ecocriticism, Rachel Carson stands out as the foundational success story with her 1962 work Silent Spring. Zhong Yan’s paper on Rachel Carson’s letters helps us understand how environmental consciousness and personal attachments amplified each other. In fact, Silent Spring is a delicately crafted combination of scientific prose, personal writing, and political rhetoric in a profoundly American idiom. If this fact had emerged a little more in Zhong Yan’s panel, the tremendous resonance between Carson and the Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai, the focus of work by Professor Adetayo Alabi, might have emerged more clearly. (Is Wangari Maathai the Rachel Carson of Kenya?) Further, given that towering figures of Chinese literature like Ji Xianlin (subject of a paper by Wu Shuang) and Shen Congwen (discussed by Professor Zhao Baisheng) express a uniquely Confucian, place-based environmental consciousness, what are the prospects for harnessing such writers’ ethical and political rhetoric in environmental writings of the contemporary moment? Zhong Yan noted in the question and answer period that the poet Xu Gang (b. 1945) has had a substantive effect on the national discussion on the environment, but just how the life course and personal consciousness factor in this writing remains to be seen.

It is extremely fitting at this moment that the intersection between life writing and global concerns such as feminism, human rights, politics, and the environment be profiled. One can only hope that these discussions will continue and expand. Lauren Berlant’s final keynote, in the form of a conversation with Jay Prosser, presented many challenges from the larger world of knowledge production outside of auto/biographical studies: to what extent have we grasped “exemplification” as a problem? How long can we go along taking the individual life as a main object of study? Berlant also calls to us for a closer consideration of institutionality. She meant particularly that we look more closely at the ways the law shapes lives and therefore life narratives, but I believe she also wanted us to consider for a moment the why behind auto/biographical studies. That this is an understudied question was evident enough in a previous day’s roundtable of editors and representatives from our major journals, where despite Rebecca Hogan’s call to discuss the why of the journals, audience and speakers alike preferred to dwell on the how and the what.

Berlant’s theory of intimacy, her project for some years now, offers a preliminary answer. Our field is a major subset of what Berlant would call “the world of affect,” the main purpose of which is to describe the multiplicity of modes of attachment: hate, ambivalence and skepticism, for example, can all be modes of attachment made public in life (and other) writing. To give historical dimension to the current moment, Berlant describes our time in terms of the withdrawing state in the 1970s, which for the intellectual left constitutes an ending to a former “fantasy.” There is no more expanding sense of citizenship. There is a need for a new concept of the good life. This, then is both a fertile and a mournful moment. The necessity is to track “people’s attachments to the world.” We must expand the field of “what it means to have a life.” Whether or not these concepts are translatable to a truly global readership (many audience members thought not), they are concerns worth addressing in detail.

No field is without aporias. Every field faces the death of its own critical practice exactly in as much as it moves inward from the margins of institutions. But the strength a field as it institutionalizes must lie in scholars’ capacity to see and respond to the needs of other scholars, students, writers and readers. There is much evidence that IABA is such a dynamic, responsive field, and for that reason alone, I look forward to 2012 when we shall meet again in Canberra, Australia.