Auto/Biography across the Americas: Transnational Themes in Life Writing ed. by Ricia Anne Chansky (review)

Abstract

The 2012 season of the popular reality television show Canada Reads—a competition that purports to select one book that all Canadians should read—featured three memoirs. The series follows a typical competition format: books are nominated by viewers, and their merits are subsequently debated on the show by celebrities, with one book per episode voted off until the “winner” remains. The 2012 competition erupted into a particularly heated debate over two of the three finalists, when Anne-France Goldwater suggested that Marina Nemat’s Prisoner of Tehran was not strictly true and that Carmen Aguirre—author of the memoir Something Fierce, which eventually won the competition—was a terrorist. As Julie Rak argues in her contribution to the edited volume Auto/Biography Across the Americas: Transnational Themes in Life Writing, “Canada Reads stopped being a game-show about nationalist forms of reading and became the focus of a serious discussion about memoir, nationalism, and ethics,” ultimately highlighting “the status of memoir as a transnational product” (54, 57). Something fierce, indeed. The controversy tested readers’ and viewers’ assumptions about truth in memoir, the autobiographical pact, and corresponding legalistic readings of authenticity and witness, what should or can be said in public, and what kind of literature counts as Canadian literature. The controversy involves entangled questions about nation, identity, migration, belonging, and who has the cultural authority to decide what constitutes truth—issues central to Ricia Anne Chansky’s edited volume about “transnational themes in life writing.” In Auto/Biography Across the Americas, Chansky has collected twelve thought-provoking essays focusing on “points of connectivity” (4), linking life writing across the Americas. Chansky argues that these narratives are characterized broadly by two key themes: movement and belonging. More generally, she argues that auto/biography studies would benefit from centering theories, narratives, and disciplinary perspectives that destabilize nationalist frameworks for understanding literature and identity. As Chansky puts it,