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Center for Biographical Research | Life Writing at the University of Hawaiʻi at MānoaSkip to Main Content
Native Hawaiian Student Services and the Center for Biographical Research present:
The 1898 Project Summit
Saturday, April 13, 1:00–8:00 pm Sunday April 14, 9:00 am–6:00 pm
Kamakakūokalani Center for Hawaiian Studies, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
The 1898 Project is a two-day summit of leading scholars and activists on American imperialism from Hawaiʻi, Guåhan, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico; the how and why, its effects, and what can be done now and in the future to cope, heal, and decolonize.
The Center for Biographical Research is now accepting nominations for the 2024 Biography Prize
Criteria for Nomination:
The candidate should be a PhD or MA student in any graduate department of the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa (or have graduated with an MA or PhD in December 2023).
The submission can be work written for a class, a section of a thesis or dissertation, or a completed thesis or dissertation. If written for a class, it should be work completed between May 2023 and April 2024 (and not previously submitted for a Biography Prize).
The project should be 3,000 to 10,000 words in length. Longer projects can be submitted in their entirety, with a particular chapter or section highlighted for consideration. The work should demonstrate knowledge or awareness of central debates and theorizing in the field and study of life writing.
Please send nominations (graduate student’s name and subject or title of project) and contact information to Paige Rasmussen (biograph@hawaii.edu) by Tuesday, April 9.
Once you send your nomination, the Center for Biographical Research will notify the student to arrange for submission of the project. Candidates may also nominate their own work for the award. The deadline for submissions is Tuesday, April 16.
The winner of the Biography Prize receives a monetary award and is invited to give a presentation in the Brown Bag Biography lecture series.
Please join the Center for Biographical Research in congratulating Biography coeditor L. Ayu Saraswati! Her book Scarred: A Feminist Journey Through Pain (NYU Press, 2023) won the Autobiography and Biography category of the AAP PROSE Book Award!
Let us continue to tell the tale. On December 7, 2023, Refaat Alareer was killed in his sister’s home—along with his brother, his sister, and her four children—in Gaza by an Israeli airstrike. Refaat Alareer was a father; a beloved professor at the Islamic University in Gaza (destroyed last month by Israeli airstrikes) who taught poetry, Shakespeare, and creative writing; a mentor; the editor of the story collection Gaza Writes Back and coeditor of the essay collection Gaza Unsilenced; a poet and writer; and the founder of the organization We Are Not Numbers.
He was also a highly valued contributor to “Life in Occupied Palestine,” a 2014 special issue of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly.
As the editors worked with Refaat and other contributors in the summer of 2014 to finalize that special issue, Israeli forces killed Refaat’s brother Mohammed Alareer during Israel’s fifty-one-day siege on Gaza. That special issue was dedicated to Mohammed:
“In memory of Mohammed Alareer, and every Palestinian whose life was cut short in the summer of 2014, and in the decades before, struggling against Israeli colonization.”
“A house of four floors but thousands of stories is no more. The stories, however, will live to bear witness to the most brutally wild occupation the world has ever known.” —Refaat R. Alareer
Almost ten years later, during Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, Refaat pinned to his X account the very poem that concludes his contribution to that special issue of Biography—and that has now been shared around the world:
If I must die
If I must die, you have to live To tell my story, to sell my things To buy a piece of cloth and some strings, (Make it white with a long tail) So that a child, somewhere in Gaza While looking heaven in the eye, Making it blush under his gaze, Awaiting his Dad who left in a blaze— And bid no one farewell Not even to his flesh, not even to himself— Sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above And thinks for a moment an angel is there Bringing back love. If I must die, let it bring hope. Let it be a tale.
Refaat Alareer’s essay for Biography, along with the entire special issue, is freely available on Project Muse: https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/31638.
We mourn his passing, and honor his vision for hope and liberation.
The Center for Biographical Research is pleased to announce the latest special issue of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, available on Project Muse!
Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly volume 45, number 4
“After(Life) Narratives of #MeToo”
Rebecca Wanzo and Carol A. Stabile, guest editors
Table of Contents
“#MeToo: A Biography”
Rebecca Wanzo and Carol A. Stabile
This introduction looks at the difference between Tarana Burke’s “me too” and #MeToo. The chronologically distinct origin stories for the forms of activism #MeToo has generated illustrate a distinction between Burke’s “me too,” grounded in her work with Black girls and created to raise awareness of the collective plight of survivors of sexual violence, and “#MeToo,” an example of hashtag feminism that has come to be associated with identifying individual bad actors. We look at various manifestations of #MeToo as well as feminist debates in telling the story about #MeToo’s successes and failures.
“Micro-disclosures for Macro-erasures: #MeToo in the Academy”
Roopika Risam
This essay explores how we might account for the influence of #MeToo in the academy and the extent to which we can understand the power of these utterances as a form of narrative agency expressed through digital life writing. Drawing on a blend of quantitative and qualitative analysis of #MeToo-related tweets about academia, the essay first examines how narrative agency over sexual harassment and violence in higher education is expressed through #MeToo. It further explores how the threat of retaliation and the troubling operationalization of Title IX by universities as an anti-survivor discourse produces macro-erasures of narrative agency. Finally, the essay proposes that #MeToo tweets about higher education are best understood as “micro-disclosures,” a distinct form of life writing that facilitates the narrative agency denied by institutional systems and processes.
“#MeToo Storytelling: Confession, Testimony, and Life Writing”
Leigh Gilmore
This article argues that two discourses—confession and testimony—influence the stories survivors tell about sexual violence, the stories others tell about them, and the contexts in which #MeToo storytelling is heard. It identifies how confession and testimony crop up in several #MeToo forms within and beyond the courts, including abuser apologies, letters of support, victim impact statements, memoirs, and lawsuits. It demonstrates that #MeToo is altering the form of testimony itself as its commitment to truth-telling enacts justice-seeking in an extrajudicial form.
“Reproducing and Resisting Sexual Violence: Narrative, Genre, and Power Structure in Fang Siqi’s First Love Paradise”
Rong Huang and Xiaotian Jin
In her semi-autobiographical novel Fang Siqi’s First Love Paradise, Lin Yihan weaves her own traumatic experience of being sexually abused into a powerful narrative that sheds light on the pervasive acquiescence to violence against women in patriarchal cultures. Focusing on the sociocultural factors behind sexual violence, this article examines certain forms of narrative and literary genre, as revealed in the novel, that can be manipulated by male perpetrators and thus play a complicit role in reproducing crimes. But by blurring the divide between fiction and nonfiction, the reception and massive readership of the novel attest to a sort of narrative solidarity against sexual violence, making it an iconic text of the contemporary feminist movement in East Asia.
“Sex, Violence, and Memoir: David Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives”
Greta LaFleur and Dana Seitler
This article engages David Wojnarowicz’s “memoir of disintegration” Close to the Knives (1991), a text that contains numerous and variegated representations of sexual encounters before and during the beginnings of the AIDS crisis in the United States. Wojnarowicz’s memoir provides this article with its critical focus because it points us to one iteration of the narratological before-life of the #MeToo movement. In this article, we explore how, in the text, the violence that infuses sex, as well as the sexual intensity that drives violence, is presented as a social and structural problem rather than as an individualized desire, aberration, or impulse. Sexual harm, rather, is primarily a structural reality that in turn informs the way that both sex and violence are practiced—by Wojnarowicz himself, by his lovers and friends, and even by his family. Close to the Knives thus presents the reader with a tension between, on the one hand, Wojnarowicz’s playful curiosity surrounding the relationship between sex, violence, and harm, and on the other, formal questions about memoir. In this article, we ask: how can we develop an ethics around sexual violence—without reifying either sex or acts of self-narration?
“‘If it didn’t hurt so bad, I’d kill myself, but I’ll let Ed Buck do it for now’: #JusticeforGemmel and Black Queer Narratives in the Age and Afterlife of #MeToo”
Terrance Wooten
Gemmel Moore, a gay Black man, was found dead in the West Hollywood home of Edward Buck, a gay white LGBT rights activist. Gemmel’s death was originally classified as an accident until his family published his journal, which was used to ignite both a criminal investigation and a set of Twitter campaigns, #Justice4Gemmel and #StopEdBuck, that have intersected with the #MeToo movement. In this essay, I analyze how Black queer men narrate their experiences of sexual trauma in relation to Black women, and subsequently how Black women have carved space for Black queer survivors by providing a new language for conceptualizing the racialized gendering of sexual violence. In doing so, I examine how Black queer men’s autobiographical narratives function not only as evidence of their sexual injury but also as modes of networked connectivity that position Black queer subjects as integral to anti-sexual violence work and #MeToo activism.
“Disability and Sexual Assault in Public(s): Performance/Nebula”
Petra Kuppers
This montage essay investigates elliptical fractured storytelling modes around disabled embodiment, a court case of sexual assault, and the social media aftermath. It tracks how knowledge of perceived sexual vulnerability folds into one’s bodymindspirit, and how pain runs through and shifts in these multiple foldings. The essay’s earthy, plate-moving tectonics build an autoethnographic star-reaching galaxy that incorporates various modes of storytelling, including social media, poetry, movement, and court discourse. This storytelling montage is hesitant, and creates temporal folds that allow an “I” to slip away into sheltering silences.
“‘We Grew Up in This Movement’: A Conversation between Salamishah Tillet and Scheherazade Tillet”
Salamishah Tillet and Scheherazade Tillet
Writer and activist Salamishah Tillet and photographer and organizer Scheherazade Tillet engaged in a lively and in-depth conversation about their work to end sexual violence before and beyond #MeToo. In 2003, the Tillet sisters founded A Long Walk Home, a nonprofit that empowers young people to use art to end violence against girls and women. Yet their actual organizing work began five years earlier when Scheherazade, at twenty years old, began documenting Salamishah’s healing after being sexually assaulted in college. From 1998 to 2013, Scheherazade took thousands of images, many of which became the spine of Story Of A Rape Survivor (SOARS), a performance that the Tillet sisters created and toured with a cast of Black women singers, dancers, and actors at rape crisis centers and college campuses over two decades. Some of those photographs are included here, along with others from the performances, to provide a visual archive of the innovative artistic process and the unique political intervention of SOARS from its very beginning.
“The Afterlives of #MeToo: A Roundtable Discussion with Māhealani Ahia, Michelle Cho, Pallavi Guha, Régine Michelle Jean-Charles, Kahala Johnson, and Ever E. Osorio”
Organized by Greta LaFleur and Dana Seitler
One of the risks of a special issue with US-based editors and with a topic overwhelmingly identified not only with the US but also with affluent white women is that conversations might neglect the expertise of scholars focused on Indigeneity and the majority of the world. The diverse scholars who contribute to this roundtable—while by no means covering every region in which #MeToo activism has taken place—decenter the US in exploring #MeToo discourse, and blend discussions of medium in activism, solidarity, and cultural specificity in relation to their own stories.
We’re excited to announce the schedule for Brown Bag Biography, Fall 2023.
All of our talks will be held in person in Kuykendall 410 or Biomed B-104 (UH Mānoa). For streaming information for select talks, please visit our website and social media, where we will post detailed announcements for each event. We will also record and post many of the talks. You can find some past presentations on our YouTube channel here.
THE CENTER FOR BIOGRAPHICAL RESEARCH, UNIVERSITY OF HAWAIʻI AT MĀNOA
September 14: “Narrating Humanity: Life Writing and Movement Politics from Palestine to Mauna Kea: A Book Talk”
Cynthia Franklin, Professor, Department of English, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
Location: KUY 410
Time: 12:00–1:15 pm HST
September 21: “Staging Shakespeare in ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi”
Tammy Hailiʻōpua Baker, Professor, Department of Theatre and Dance, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
Justin Fragiao, MFA Student in Scenic Design, Department of Theatre and Dance, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
Iāsona Kaper, MFA Student in Hawaiian Theatre, Department of Theatre and Dance, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
Joshua Kamoaniʻala “Baba” Tavares, MFA Student in Acting & Hawaiian Theatre, Department of Theatre and Dance, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
Devin Walter, MFAStudent in Costume Design, Department of Theatre and Dance, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
Noelani Montas, MFA Student in Hawaiian Theatre, Department of Theatre and Dance, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
Location: KUY 410
Time: 12:00–1:15 pm HST
September 28: Break
October 5:“Reflections on Returning Home to Hawaiʻi”
Patrick Kirch, Professor of Anthropology, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, and Professor Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley
Location: KUY 410
Time: 12:00–1:15 pm HST
October 12:“The Political Economy of Environmental Racism in Waiʻanae”
Laurel Mei-Singh, Assistant Professor of Geography and Environment and Asian American Studies, University of Texas at Austin
Location: KUY 410
Time: 12:00–1:15 pm HST
October 19:“Makawalu Perspectives on Silence: Reimagining the ‘Gaps’ as Stories”
Kayla Watabu, PhD student and Assistant Director of the Writing Center, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
Location: KUY 410
Time: 12:00–1:15 pm HST
October 26:“Beyond Anthropocentrism(?): Logos and the Aesthetic Relation”
Sarah Allen, Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Composition and the Director of
Writing Programs, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
Location: KUY 410
NB: Time: 3:00–4:30 pm HST
November 2:“Anarchives: How We Remember Our Political Movement Is Part of the Movement”
Kathy E. Ferguson, Professor, Departments of Political Science and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
Location: KUY 410
Time: 12:00–1:15 pm HST
November 9:“Lifelines: Poems for Winslow Homer and Edward Hopper”
Joseph Stanton, Professor Emeritus of American Studies and Art History, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
Location: KUY 410
Time: 12:00–1:15 pm HST
November 16:“Explorations of Agency in Life Writing by LGBTQ+ Youth ”
Dr. Roz Bellamy, Academic, La Trobe University, Melbourne/Naarm
Location: Biomed B-104
Time: 12:00–1:15 pm HST
NB: November 21:“Narrative self-construction in autobiographical comics”
Zuzana Fonioková, Assistant Professor, Department of Czech Literature, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
Location: Biomed B-104
Time: 12:00–1:15 pm HST
November 23: Thanksgiving
November 30:“World War II Legacies and Inheritances: Discoveries in a Community Biography Project”
Moderated by Gail Y. Okawa, Professor Emerita of English, Youngstown State University-Ohio, and Coordinator, CONNECTIONS: Santa Fe Internment Camp Descendants Group
Naomi Hirano-Omizo, Japanese language faculty, Punahou School, Mid-Pacific Institute (ret.)
Alison Kaʻōlinokaimana Yasuoka, Arts Integration Specialist, Voyager Public Charter School (Honolulu), and MEd Candidate in Curriculum Studies: STEMS2, College of Education, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
Annette Tashiro, Chair, State Rehabilitation Council of Hawaii; Rehabilitation Counselor, State of Hawai`i (ret.)
Grant Din, Co-curator and lead researcher, “Taken from Their Families” exhibit, Immigration Station, Angel Island State Park (virtual from San Francisco, CA)
We’re excited to announce our first Brown Bag event, “Narrating Humanity: A Book Talk” with Cynthia Franklin! Please join us in Kuykendall 410 (UH Mānoa) on September 14 from 12 to 1:15 pm to celebrate the recent release of Dr. Franklin’s book.
We will announce our full Fall 2023 Brown Bag Biography schedule in the coming days.
September 14: “Narrating Humanity: Life Writing and Movement Politics from Palestine to Mauna Kea: A Book Talk”
Cynthia Franklin, Professor, Department of English, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
Moderated by Monisha Das Gupta, Professor, Department of Ethnic Studies, UHM
Special guest appearance by ‘Ihilani Lasconia, PhD Student, Department of Political Science, UHM, and D. Kauwila Mahi, PhD Student, Department of Political Science, UHM
Cosponsored by Students and Faculty for Justice in Palestine at UH (SFJP@UH), Sabeel-Hawaiʻi, Jewish Voice for Peace-Hawaiʻi, Hamilton Library, the Hawaiʻinuiākea School of Hawaiian Knowledge, the Matsunaga Institute, Conflict and Peace Specialist, the School of Communication & Information, the Departments of American Studies, Ethnic Studies, Sociology, and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Location: KUY 410
Time: 12:00–1:15 pm HST
“Original, innovative, and thorough. In Narrating Humanity, Cynthia Franklin creates an important new language, and new critical modality, for speaking about narrative and politics, and the relationship of self to both.” -Bill Mullen
Cynthia G. Franklin is Professor of English at the University of Hawai‘i. She coedits the journal Biography, and in addition to Narrating Humanity (2023), is author of Academic Lives: Memoir, Cultural Theory, and the University Today (2009) as well as Writing Women’s Communities: The Politics and Poetics of Multi-Genre Anthologies (1994). She has also coedited a number of special journal issues, including, for Biography, “Life in Occupied Palestine.” She is part of the Editorial Collective for the newly constituted initiative EtCH (Essays in the Critical Humanities), and cofounder of Students and Faculty for Justice in Palestine at UH (SFJP@UH) and of Jewish Voice for Peace-Hawai‘i.
The Center for Biographical Research is thrilled to announce that “Graphic Medicine,” a special issue of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly (volume 44, numbers 2 & 3) and a book published by University of Hawaiʻi Press, has been nominated for an Eisner Award!
Named for comics artist Will Eisner, the Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards are the most prestigious form of recognition for excellent publications and creators in comics and graphic novels. Graphic Medicine has been nominated in the category of “Best Academic / Scholarly Work.”
Bandits, Misfits, and Superheroes: Whiteness and Its Borderlands in American Comics and Graphic Novels, by Josef Benson and Doug Singsen (University Press of Mississippi)
Graphic Medicine, edited by Erin La Cour and Anna Poletti (University of Hawai’i’ Press)
How Comics Travel: Publication, Translation, Radical Literacies, by Katherine Kelp-Stebbins (Ohio State University Press)
The LGBTQ+ Comics Studies Reader: Critical Openings, Future Directions, edited by Alison Halsall and Jonathan Warren (University Press of Mississippi)
Teaching with Comics and Graphic Novels. By Tim Smyth (Routledge)
Comic book academics, educators, and publishers are eligible to vote for the Eisner Awards. If you’re interested in voting for Graphic Medicine, and for nominees in any of the thirty-one other categories, follow this link to apply: https://https://form.jotform.com/230927489799177. Eligible voters will then be invited to cast their votes until June 9. The deadline to register to vote is June 2.
For a full list of the 2023 Eisner Awards Nominees, click here!
In Graphic Medicine, comics artists and scholars of life writing, literature, and comics explore the lived experience of illness and disability through original texts, images, and the dynamic interplay between the two. The essays and autobiographical comics in this collection respond to the medical humanities’ call for different perceptions and representations of illness and disability than those found in conventional medical discourse. Edited by Erin La Cour and Anna Poletti, the collection expands and troubles our understanding of the relationships between patients and doctors, nurses, social workers, caregivers, and family members, considering such encounters in terms of cultural context, language, gender, class, and ethnicity. By treating illness and disability as an experience of fundamentally changed living, rather than a separate narrative episode organized by treatment, recovery, and a return to “normal life,” Graphic Medicine asks what it means to give and receive care. Contributors include comic artists and essayists Safdar Ahmed, John Miers, Suzy Becker, Nancy K. Miller, Jared Gardner, Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, JoAnn Purcell, Susan Squier and Erin La Cour.
We are working on Biography’s annual annotated bibliography of critical and theoretical works on life writing, the most extensive reference of its kind, and before finalizing it, we want to make sure it is as timely, inclusive, and extensive as possible.
If last year (from January to December 2022) you published, edited, or coedited a book; wrote an article for a journal or an essay for an edited collection; or completed your doctoral dissertation, we would appreciate having that information, so that we can incorporate it into the list. (We may have already included it, but this will make sure your work is noted.) We are also interested in lifewriting-focused podcasts or other media, excluding individual presentations or talks.
We would request the following information:
· Full bibliographic information for each text, formatted according to MLA 9 style
· A one-sentence annotation per text
We are especially committed to noting publications in languages other than English. If you could provide an annotation in English, however, that would be helpful.
We would appreciate getting the information by Monday, June 5. Please send your information to Caroline Zuckerman (gabiog@hawaii.edu).
Thanks in advance. This bibliography usually has between 1,400 and 1,500 entries, and represents the most extensive annual critical survey of the field. We want to make sure your work appears within it.
