1st Edition
Autoethnography in the 21st Century, Volume I Colonialism, Immigration, Embodiment, and Belonging
Autoethnography in the 21st Century offers interpretive, analytic, interactive, performative, experiential, and embodied forms of autoethnography from around the globe.
Volume I, Colonialism, Immigration, Embodiment, Belonging examines forms of autoethnography as a decolonizing and dehegemonizing practice in the allegedly post-racial, post-colonial, and post-(hetero)sexist twenty-first century. Contributors use autoethnographic methods and practices to interrogate the dominant cultural practices and political exigencies that have shaped their lives, their arts, and their academic work on bicultural, queer, gender-subordinated, or post-colonial experience. It features autobiographical and anthropological poetics, autotheory, and fieldwork grounded in Africa, Argentina, Australia, Canada, China, and the United States. The book will be of interest to students and researchers in the fields of critical autoethnography, communication, cultural and gender studies, and other related disciplines.
The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Life Writing.
Introduction - Autoethnography and Beyond: Colonialism, Immigration, Embodiment, and Belonging
Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle
1. Manthia Diawara’s Autoethnographic Forays in Memoir and Film from ‘Counter’ to ‘Strong’ to ‘Beyond’
Julia Watson
2. ‘The Synergy Between You’: Mothers, Nannies, and Collaborative Caregiving in Contemporary Matroethnographies
Elizabeth Podnieks
3. Becoming a Settler Descendant: Critical Engagements with Inherited Family Narratives of Indigeneity, Agriculture and Land in a (Post)Colonial Context
Cameo Dalley
4. Materialising the Decolonising Autobiography
Emily R.M. Lind
5. Spectator Curator: An Autoethnographic Tour of a Latinx in Canada
Luciana Erregue
6. On Being Impossible: Thoughts on Ethnicity, Embodiment and Kinship
May Friedman
7. Bitter/Love: A Mixed-Race Body Archive
Sonja Boon
8. Details Optional: An Account of Academic Promotion Relative to Opportunity
Agnes Bosanquet
9. Journalling in the Currents of Yin and Yang: Adrift in the Chinese Academic Job Market
Lingjuan Fan
Biography
Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle is Professor of English at The College of New Jersey, USA. Her work appears in Life Writing, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, The European Journal of Life Writing, Persona Studies, and a/b: Auto/Biography Studies. She was the 2021-22 Fulbright Research Chair of Arts and Sciences at the University of Alberta in Edmonton Canada. Her books, Américanas, Autocracy, and Autobiographical Innovation: Overwriting the Dictator (2020) and and Career Narratives and Academic Womanhood: In the Spaces Provided (2023) are published with Routledge Press in its Auto/biography Studies Series. Her current project, tentatively titled Life’s Work: Career Narrative as Autobiography in the North American Academy, is a study of functional forms of life writing in academic careers. She serves as Editor in Chief of a/b: Auto/biography Studies.
