Life/Writing brings together essays that represent the author’s contribution to the field of Life Writing/Studies over the last decade and a half. While reflecting the major themes and shifting trends in Life Writing/Studies, the essays deploy a variety of frames of analysis including theories of Life Writing and biography writing, studies of the testimonio genre, ideas of precarity and prevarious lives, and disability studies. The texts used for analysis range from Dalit autobiographies and ‘autobiogenographies’ to neurogothic life writing and graphic narratives. Extending and challenging the conceptual vocabulary, semantic scope and analytical boundaries of Life Writing/Studies, the volume is testimony to a sustained, deep and nuanced engagement with the field.
Pramod K. Nayar is Professor at the Department of English, University of Hyderabad. Nayar holds the UNESCO Chair in Vulnerability Studies at the University of Hyderabad.
Preface Acknowledgements Introduction: Forms of Life/Writing
Victim Auto/biography, Community and the ‘Subject’ of Human Rights 1. Bama’s Karukku Dalit Autobiography as Testimonio
2. Trauma, Testimony, and Human Rights Women’s Atrocity Narratives from Postcolonial India
3. Postcolonial Affects Victim Life Narratives and Human Rights in Contemporary India
4. Writing Survival Narratives from the Anti-Sikh Pogrom, India 1984
5. The Poetics of Postcolonial Atrocity Dalit Life Writing, Testimonio, and Human Rights
6. Writing Disability and Rights in Naseema
Genomics, Belonging and (Collective) Lives 7. Genetics and Auto/Biography
8. Genomes, or the Book of Life Itself
9. Autobiogenography Genomes and Life Writing
10. Genetic Prosopography and Caste Natureculture in Contemporary India
11. The Double (H)Elixir of Life Genetic Citizenship and Belonging in the Twenty-first Century
12. The Biogenographic Imagination DNA, History and the Romance of Species Cosmopolitanism
13. Neurogothic Life/Writing Locked-in Humans and the Self
Graphic Life/Writing 14. Towards a Postcolonial Critical Literacy Bhimayana and the Indian graphic novel
15. South of the Graphics Gandhi, Mandela, and Telling Lives
16. Postcolonial Graphic Lifewriting Finding My Way and the Subaltern Public Sphere
17. The Indian Graphic Novel and Dalit Trauma A Gardener in the Wasteland
18. Radical Graphics Martin Luther King, Jr., B. R. Ambedkar, and Comics Auto/Biography
19. Narrating Alzheimer’s Disease Graphic Medicine and Dana Walrath’s Aliceheimer’s
20. Communicable Diseases Graphic Medicine and the Extreme