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Transculturing Auto/Biography: Formsof Life WritingPublished online: 15 Oct 2009.

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Review

Rosalia Baena (ed.) Transculturing Auto/Biography: Forms of Life Writing.

London and NY: Routledge. 2007. 129 pages, ISBN 10:0415400430 and ISBN

13:9780415400435.

Reviewed by: John Gatt-Rutter

This volume addresses transcultural or transethnic life writing along the axis

of form rather than content: That is, it is less concerned with defining issues of

identity and ethnicity than with exploring the different genres or modes through

which these issues are played out. The latter objective, however, proves quite

effective in illuminating the former. The very term ‘transcultural’ is deployed in

Baena’s introduction to describe the open-ended interplay of minority cultures

within a dominant culture. In this volume, the dominant culture concerned is

North American, with the exception of Rita Monticelli’s study of the European

travel writings of the nineteenth-century Englishwoman Anna Jameson. This

latter is also an exception in having only a slight connection with life writing,

consisting in the role attributed by Jameson to her own person as cultural and

educational intermediary. Dorothea Fischer Hornung’s presentation of Maya

Deren’s early experimental films is perhaps more persuasive in its strenuous

argument that Deren’s performative use of her own person as (co-)producer,

director, actor, and promoter of her films is tantamount to a form of life writing,

with pronounced Jewish, Russian and other ethnic components, though (or

through) denying any autobiographical contract. Other contributions do not

stretch the concept of life writing so far. Gita Rajan debates an interesting case

for ‘autography’ as a key form of life writing which does not attempt longitudinal

narrative coherence but presents separate, indeed disparate, selves, or moments

of the changeable self. She applies this to the juxtaposition of different

representational and iconographical traditions (Mughal, Persian, Jewish, Amer-

ican) for the self-portraiture of the female brown subject in the pictorial

artworks of three South Asian American artists, Siona Benjamin, Annu Palakun-

nathu Matthew and Ambreen Butt.Autography nicely fits the argument of Danielle Schaub on the short story

cycle as lending itself to the representation of moments of partial but cumulative

illumination of the self by the Jewish Canadian Fredelle Bruser Maynard. If short

story cycles are not a million miles away from consecutive narrative autobio-

graphies, the comic strip is also not too distant an analogue of the more literary

ISSN 1448-4528 print/1751-2964 online/09/020281-03# 2009 John Gatt-RutterDOI: 10.1080/14484520902931099

Life Writing VOLUME 6 NUMBER 2 (AUGUST 2009)

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form, and Rocı́o G. Davis skilfully presents the transcultural life-writing

transactions of Persepolis, the Iranian Marjane Satrapi’s comic-strip autobio-

graphy of her childhood and youth (in which American culture stands as the

opposite pole to traditional Iran, though Satrapi’s subsequent life was spent

mainly in European countries). Alison D. Goeller’s ‘The Hungry Self: the Politics

of Food in Italian American Women’s Autobiography’ pursues a topic that has

been attracting increasing attention in transethnic studies with the culinary

return of the ethnic. A completely different turn is Ana Beatriz Delgado’s enquiry

into Charlotte Gray’s joint biography of the Strickland sisters, Susanna Moodie

and Catherine Parr Traill, both writers, who migrated from England to Canada in

1832: Literary biography is here interrogated as part of the enterprise of national

myth-building.But the most ambitious offering in this collection, intellectually and, one

might say, metaphysically*/and absolutely central to transcultural life writing*/

is the opening chapter by William Boelhower, ‘Shifting Forms of Sovereignty:

Immigrant Parents and Ethnic Autobiographers’. Drawing particularly on Bataille

and Mauss on the one side and on Geertz, Rawls and Shklar on the other,

Boelhower argues that the parental act of immigration is a sacrificial wager

which does not relinquish personal sovereignty but is to be redeemed or fulfilled

by the achievement of personal sovereignty by the parents’ children in the new

country not merely in the economistic, but in the moral, sphere of the gift

exchange economy deriving from the country of origin and its authentic

traditions, as instanced in Mark Mathabane’s Kaffir Boy in America, Richard

Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory, Maxine Hong Kingston’s Chinamen, Edward

Rivera’s Family Installments, Anzia Yezierska’s Red Ribbon on a White Horse,

Yoshiko Uchida’s Desert Exile, The Uprooting of a Japanese-American Family,

and Helen Barolini’s autobiographical essay ‘How I Learned to Speak Italian’.

No doubt this forceful paradigm will provoke discussion: Does it romanticise or

mystify the migratory calculus? Or privilege its optimal variants, as enshrined in

literary monuments? Does identity and ethnic authenticity not reside in America,

too, but only outside? Does the American destination offer a representative

model? Would that model fit the experience of Turks in Germany or North

Africans in France? Gita Rajan addresses Homi Bhabha’s impasse over the

impossibility of fixing a canonical position from which to define and assess:

‘Where must I stand?’ (35; quoting Bhabha). Rajan’s rejoinder confirms the

impasse: ‘Bhabha reveals his own place as the originator of the gaze, as the one

who holds the power to measure the artist on his analytic scale, so that she is

able to inhabit only a model resembling assimilative hybridity, or resistant ethnic

identity, or diasporic angst.’ (35) The ‘loaded canvases’ (40) drawing on multiple

meaning systems, diverse communities and traditions or ‘genealogies’, perhaps

threaten to lead the artists concerned into atomized individualism nurtured on a

supermarket model of cultural commodities*/a mosaic dangerously tending to

degenerate into a melting-pot, with incalculable losses and gains for both the

receiving society and those received into it.

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In these, as in other ways, this volume opens up the range of transcultural life-writing studies. The comparative study of transcultural life-writing texts grows

ever broader as the variety of ethnic combinations, the variety of text types andmedia proliferate, with the internet throwing up new forms of life writing.

Although all the contributors to the volume are sensitive to the problematicalstatus of the self, including the non-identity of the speaking/writing/projecting

self and the spoken/written/projected self, all of them imply, and some affirm inpassing, the possibility of agency and of achieving a more than illusory or

socioculturally determined sense of self, especially through the exercise of lifewriting. It may be remarked in passing that, except for Boelhower’s contribution,

male life writers are conspicuous by their absence from this volume, as they arenot in the world outside it. However, by the consistently high level ofcompetence of the individual contributions, by the diversity of perspectives

and text types and life writers covered, by the combined breadth and depth ofboth the empirical and the theoretical enquiry, and by the collective and

concerted focus on forms, modes, media and genres of life writing, RosaliaBaena’s volume makes a valuable contribution to life-writing studies.

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