Pub Date : 2022-05-04DOI: 10.1080/08989575.2022.2135241
N. Tembo
Abstract This article explores the relationship between trauma and comedy as represented in Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood. Drawing on Nira Yuval-Davis’s conceptualization of belonging and Jacques Derrida’s notions of hauntology and the revenant, I consider the attention Born a Crime gives to history, experience, and the memory of pre- and post-1994 South Africa. Specifically, I examine the ways in which Noah’s memoir comments on and contributes to a narrative of pain, identity, belonging, and racialized politics. I also argue that as Noah uses his personal and subjective experiences to critique the ideology of apartheid, he opens the dialogue for South Africans to interrogate their past in order for them to know how to deal with their psychosocial present.
{"title":"Confronting Apartheid’s Revenants: Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime and/as Traumedy","authors":"N. Tembo","doi":"10.1080/08989575.2022.2135241","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2022.2135241","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article explores the relationship between trauma and comedy as represented in Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood. Drawing on Nira Yuval-Davis’s conceptualization of belonging and Jacques Derrida’s notions of hauntology and the revenant, I consider the attention Born a Crime gives to history, experience, and the memory of pre- and post-1994 South Africa. Specifically, I examine the ways in which Noah’s memoir comments on and contributes to a narrative of pain, identity, belonging, and racialized politics. I also argue that as Noah uses his personal and subjective experiences to critique the ideology of apartheid, he opens the dialogue for South Africans to interrogate their past in order for them to know how to deal with their psychosocial present.","PeriodicalId":37895,"journal":{"name":"a/b: Auto/Biography Studies","volume":"21 1","pages":"263 - 283"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85472738","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-04DOI: 10.1080/08989575.2022.2136826
Kylie Cardell, Kate Douglas
Abstract In her 2017 podcast Mum Says My Memoir Is a Lie, the author and comedian Rosie Waterland reads aloud her bestselling memoir, The Anti-Cool Girl (2015), chapter by chapter to her mother. As Rosie reads and her mother responds, the podcast mimics and destabilizes some of the more persistent critiques that have attended memoirs of traumatic childhood. This essay discusses the authors’ experience teaching Waterland’s podcast as a set text in an undergraduate course on contemporary life writing. Waterland’s account of a traumatic childhood fits to the dominant tropes of trauma text or misery lit that have been used to describe (mostly pejoratively) life narrative in the twenty-first century. However, as a humorous memoir, the podcast also works with affective registers and comic strategies that are designed to unsettle or disarm reader expectations and heighten critical literacy. In discussing teaching Mum Says My Memoir Is a Lie, the authors address foundational scholarly issues of truth, memory, ethics, and authenticity. As a podcast, the text also draws attention to medium and mediation, which are central. The act of listening places the student in a subject position that is inhabited in the podcast by Rosie’s mother, Lisa. What ethics of listening, or questions of responsibility in the face of trauma and testimony, might be framed here? And how might the podcast be a significant or unique medium for this kind of engagement?
{"title":"Okay to Laugh? Trauma, Memoir, and Teaching the Podcast Mum Says My Memoir Is a Lie","authors":"Kylie Cardell, Kate Douglas","doi":"10.1080/08989575.2022.2136826","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2022.2136826","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In her 2017 podcast Mum Says My Memoir Is a Lie, the author and comedian Rosie Waterland reads aloud her bestselling memoir, The Anti-Cool Girl (2015), chapter by chapter to her mother. As Rosie reads and her mother responds, the podcast mimics and destabilizes some of the more persistent critiques that have attended memoirs of traumatic childhood. This essay discusses the authors’ experience teaching Waterland’s podcast as a set text in an undergraduate course on contemporary life writing. Waterland’s account of a traumatic childhood fits to the dominant tropes of trauma text or misery lit that have been used to describe (mostly pejoratively) life narrative in the twenty-first century. However, as a humorous memoir, the podcast also works with affective registers and comic strategies that are designed to unsettle or disarm reader expectations and heighten critical literacy. In discussing teaching Mum Says My Memoir Is a Lie, the authors address foundational scholarly issues of truth, memory, ethics, and authenticity. As a podcast, the text also draws attention to medium and mediation, which are central. The act of listening places the student in a subject position that is inhabited in the podcast by Rosie’s mother, Lisa. What ethics of listening, or questions of responsibility in the face of trauma and testimony, might be framed here? And how might the podcast be a significant or unique medium for this kind of engagement?","PeriodicalId":37895,"journal":{"name":"a/b: Auto/Biography Studies","volume":"400 1","pages":"299 - 315"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75682914","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-04DOI: 10.1080/08989575.2022.2136823
L. Mcneill, J. Zuern
Abstract This introduction to the “Comic Lives” special issue of a/b examines the dynamic intersection of life narrative and humor. Picking up on a common theme in the contributors’ essays, the authors focus in particular on how comedians draw material for their comic performances from personal experiences of trauma and employ the rhetorical strategies of comedy to enact stealth testimony. They turn to the work of comedians such as Bo Burnham, Oliver Double, Hannah Gadsby, Hassan Minhaj, Thomas Ryan Red Corn and Sternlin Harjo, and Joe Wong to illustrate their discussion, and engage scholarship in comedy studies, persona studies, and celebrity studies to reflect on the affordances that comedy offers life narrative, the benefits and the risks of humor for auto|biographical subjects, and the capacities and limitations of the comic for resistance and counternarrative.
{"title":"A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to This Issue: Comedy and Life Narratives","authors":"L. Mcneill, J. Zuern","doi":"10.1080/08989575.2022.2136823","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2022.2136823","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This introduction to the “Comic Lives” special issue of a/b examines the dynamic intersection of life narrative and humor. Picking up on a common theme in the contributors’ essays, the authors focus in particular on how comedians draw material for their comic performances from personal experiences of trauma and employ the rhetorical strategies of comedy to enact stealth testimony. They turn to the work of comedians such as Bo Burnham, Oliver Double, Hannah Gadsby, Hassan Minhaj, Thomas Ryan Red Corn and Sternlin Harjo, and Joe Wong to illustrate their discussion, and engage scholarship in comedy studies, persona studies, and celebrity studies to reflect on the affordances that comedy offers life narrative, the benefits and the risks of humor for auto|biographical subjects, and the capacities and limitations of the comic for resistance and counternarrative.","PeriodicalId":37895,"journal":{"name":"a/b: Auto/Biography Studies","volume":"215 1","pages":"225 - 242"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75074275","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-04DOI: 10.1080/08989575.2022.2136824
Shannon Herbert
Abstract This essay positions the work of comedian Maria Bamford within the feminist and disability-justice traditions in which situated storytelling is a form of resistance and world-making. By narrativizing the process by which she came to terms with her neurodiversity within the context of stand-up comedy, Bamford also challenges transcendent and transhistorical definitions of comedy and capitalist notions of comedic success to make space for a diversity of voices and perspectives. Bamford’s work, particularly the 2017 special Old Baby, represents both the individual and social work necessary for—and the pleasure of—living a fully realized life regardless of both diagnostic status and the persistence of misogyny and ableism. By beginning her performance in front of a mirror and gradually expanding the audience, Old Baby dramatizes how the personal acceptance of neurodivergence can extend fractally to larger familial/social contexts to disrupt normativizing discourses, stigma, and the tendency to feminize mental illness by conflating it with weakness.
{"title":"Generous Laughs: The Comedic Plentitude of Maria Bamford","authors":"Shannon Herbert","doi":"10.1080/08989575.2022.2136824","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2022.2136824","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This essay positions the work of comedian Maria Bamford within the feminist and disability-justice traditions in which situated storytelling is a form of resistance and world-making. By narrativizing the process by which she came to terms with her neurodiversity within the context of stand-up comedy, Bamford also challenges transcendent and transhistorical definitions of comedy and capitalist notions of comedic success to make space for a diversity of voices and perspectives. Bamford’s work, particularly the 2017 special Old Baby, represents both the individual and social work necessary for—and the pleasure of—living a fully realized life regardless of both diagnostic status and the persistence of misogyny and ableism. By beginning her performance in front of a mirror and gradually expanding the audience, Old Baby dramatizes how the personal acceptance of neurodivergence can extend fractally to larger familial/social contexts to disrupt normativizing discourses, stigma, and the tendency to feminize mental illness by conflating it with weakness.","PeriodicalId":37895,"journal":{"name":"a/b: Auto/Biography Studies","volume":"15 Suppl 2 1","pages":"243 - 261"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79752179","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-04DOI: 10.1080/08989575.2022.2136828
Su Heng (Michael) Yi
Abstract In this autoethnographic essay, the author draws on his experiences as a Chinese immigrant in Canada to reflect on how they shaped his style of comedy and how they revealed the limitations of self-deprecating humor, particularly when it is used as a response to jokes that imply discriminatory worldviews. While a self-deprecating response can steal the laugh from the person telling a derogatory joke, its outcomes are not always certain. Studies of audience responses to comedy have indicated that the presence or absence of laughter can be seen as an affirmation or rejection of the ideas embedded in the jokes, suggesting how, when self-deprecation succeeds in provoking laughter, it runs the risk of perpetuating the harmful ideas it aims to counteract. The author examines his own confrontations with racist humor alongside accounts of similar situations involving Asian comedians living in the West, such as Ryan Higa and Joe Wong, to illustrate the dilemma of self-deprecating humor as well as the potential personal and professional consequences for those who employ it.
{"title":"Consequences of Laughter: Reflections on Performing Comedic Self-Deprecation and Reacting to Deprecation in General","authors":"Su Heng (Michael) Yi","doi":"10.1080/08989575.2022.2136828","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2022.2136828","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In this autoethnographic essay, the author draws on his experiences as a Chinese immigrant in Canada to reflect on how they shaped his style of comedy and how they revealed the limitations of self-deprecating humor, particularly when it is used as a response to jokes that imply discriminatory worldviews. While a self-deprecating response can steal the laugh from the person telling a derogatory joke, its outcomes are not always certain. Studies of audience responses to comedy have indicated that the presence or absence of laughter can be seen as an affirmation or rejection of the ideas embedded in the jokes, suggesting how, when self-deprecation succeeds in provoking laughter, it runs the risk of perpetuating the harmful ideas it aims to counteract. The author examines his own confrontations with racist humor alongside accounts of similar situations involving Asian comedians living in the West, such as Ryan Higa and Joe Wong, to illustrate the dilemma of self-deprecating humor as well as the potential personal and professional consequences for those who employ it.","PeriodicalId":37895,"journal":{"name":"a/b: Auto/Biography Studies","volume":"20 1","pages":"335 - 347"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79401867","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-05DOI: 10.1080/08989575.2021.2045740
Chloe R. Green
Abstract This essay explores the connection between physical and geopolitical boundaries in Porochista Khakpour’s 2018 memoir Sick in the forms of immigration, national identity, and cross-country migration, and the bodily boundaries that protect against infection. Rather than equating the body politic with the immune system, the author argues that Sick’s nonlinear structure creates an ideal form for representing an illness that is primarily characterized by uncertainty and multiplicity. The author then discusses how Khakpour’s connection of different states of privilege—namely, relating to class, race, and diagnosis—to this uncertain state of existence creates a form of life writing that resists the Western-centrism of narratives of illness and migration alike.
{"title":"“A Home in My Body”: Migration, Infection, and Privilege in Porochista Khakpour’s Sick","authors":"Chloe R. Green","doi":"10.1080/08989575.2021.2045740","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2021.2045740","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This essay explores the connection between physical and geopolitical boundaries in Porochista Khakpour’s 2018 memoir Sick in the forms of immigration, national identity, and cross-country migration, and the bodily boundaries that protect against infection. Rather than equating the body politic with the immune system, the author argues that Sick’s nonlinear structure creates an ideal form for representing an illness that is primarily characterized by uncertainty and multiplicity. The author then discusses how Khakpour’s connection of different states of privilege—namely, relating to class, race, and diagnosis—to this uncertain state of existence creates a form of life writing that resists the Western-centrism of narratives of illness and migration alike.","PeriodicalId":37895,"journal":{"name":"a/b: Auto/Biography Studies","volume":"140 1","pages":"629 - 646"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76605575","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-05DOI: 10.1080/08989575.2021.2045735
N. Edwards, and Christopher Hogarth
Abstract In this essay, the authors compares two works of life writing by two French-language writers of Caribbean origin: Gisèle Pineau and Fabienne Kanor. Both writers represent contemporary border crossings in their work and, importantly, contextualize these border crossings in terms of the history of the Caribbean and the legacy of slavery. Their texts are read through the lens of Michael Sheringham’s notion of the “autobiographical turning point”—an event in life writing that defines the life and the life writer, that changes the direction of the narrative, and that performs the acts of remembering and forgetting. The authors argue that these writers’ texts present border crossings as turning points in their narratives that are flawed or failures, and that these major events became spiraling rather than turning points.
{"title":"Flawed Border Crossings in Life Writing by Fabienne Kanor and Gisèle Pineau","authors":"N. Edwards, and Christopher Hogarth","doi":"10.1080/08989575.2021.2045735","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2021.2045735","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In this essay, the authors compares two works of life writing by two French-language writers of Caribbean origin: Gisèle Pineau and Fabienne Kanor. Both writers represent contemporary border crossings in their work and, importantly, contextualize these border crossings in terms of the history of the Caribbean and the legacy of slavery. Their texts are read through the lens of Michael Sheringham’s notion of the “autobiographical turning point”—an event in life writing that defines the life and the life writer, that changes the direction of the narrative, and that performs the acts of remembering and forgetting. The authors argue that these writers’ texts present border crossings as turning points in their narratives that are flawed or failures, and that these major events became spiraling rather than turning points.","PeriodicalId":37895,"journal":{"name":"a/b: Auto/Biography Studies","volume":"2011 1","pages":"543 - 558"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73682810","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-04DOI: 10.1080/08989575.2021.2045739
F. Egan
Abstract Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains gives a horrifying yet poetic account of the torture he endured on Manus Island in immigration detention. His work, written in Farsi and translated into English from thousands of text messages, was first published in English so as to give voice to Australia’s dehumanizing treatment of refugees in both a national and global discourse. This essay presents No Friend as the expression of a translating|translated self, positing that it imagines new possibilities for the narration of identity and, more specifically, of Australianness. By focusing on the bordering of translation, the essay contrasts Boochani’s expression of selfhood, which integrates linguistic, geographic, and literary borders, with a national identity that relies on unbreachable borders between us and them, Australia and Manus Island. It concludes that by using translation as an origin, like No Friend does, it is possible to conceive of an inclusive and decolonizing Australia.
{"title":"Resisting Confinement Through Translation: Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend But the Mountains","authors":"F. Egan","doi":"10.1080/08989575.2021.2045739","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2021.2045739","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains gives a horrifying yet poetic account of the torture he endured on Manus Island in immigration detention. His work, written in Farsi and translated into English from thousands of text messages, was first published in English so as to give voice to Australia’s dehumanizing treatment of refugees in both a national and global discourse. This essay presents No Friend as the expression of a translating|translated self, positing that it imagines new possibilities for the narration of identity and, more specifically, of Australianness. By focusing on the bordering of translation, the essay contrasts Boochani’s expression of selfhood, which integrates linguistic, geographic, and literary borders, with a national identity that relies on unbreachable borders between us and them, Australia and Manus Island. It concludes that by using translation as an origin, like No Friend does, it is possible to conceive of an inclusive and decolonizing Australia.","PeriodicalId":37895,"journal":{"name":"a/b: Auto/Biography Studies","volume":"37 1","pages":"523 - 542"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85572508","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-04DOI: 10.1080/08989575.2021.2045747
C. Reising
Abstract Through the motif of painting, Wajdi Mouawad’s novel Visage retrouvé and solo performance Seuls depict ruptures from a homeland and deferred return, while resisting autobiographical interpretations. Although Mouawad’s works contain elements of his forced departure from Lebanon and migration to Montreal, his aesthetic choices confound correlations between the narratives and specific places or events.
{"title":"Visual Culture and Diasporic Self -Writing: Wajdi Mouawad Paints His Way Home","authors":"C. Reising","doi":"10.1080/08989575.2021.2045747","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2021.2045747","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Through the motif of painting, Wajdi Mouawad’s novel Visage retrouvé and solo performance Seuls depict ruptures from a homeland and deferred return, while resisting autobiographical interpretations. Although Mouawad’s works contain elements of his forced departure from Lebanon and migration to Montreal, his aesthetic choices confound correlations between the narratives and specific places or events.","PeriodicalId":37895,"journal":{"name":"a/b: Auto/Biography Studies","volume":"79 1","pages":"559 - 576"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85957885","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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