Reading Displacement and Privilege

Cynthia Huff, ed. Women’s Life Writing and Imagined Communities. New York: Routledge, 2005.

Reviewed by Alison Bartlett

I picked up this book to review with interest as I have a course on women’s life writing to teach next term. I’m not sure what I was expecting: maybe a miraculous publication that could deliver a ready-made course and be a set text, or maybe just an update on theoretical issues with some relevant references. Cynthia Huff’s collection of essays on women’s life writing doesn’t sit neatly in either of these categories, but is interesting nevertheless. With fifteen chapters as well as an introductory essay it covers a broad range, reflecting the elasticity of the genre of life writing. Chapters deal not only with conventional texts (that is, books) but also girl zines, the letters produced by the women protesters at Greenham Common, the rules of the Anchorite community in medieval England, Chinese-American web diaries, and deportation narratives of Balkan women. The contributors range from postgraduates to distinguished scholars, mostly from the United States but also from British Columbia, Canada, Estonia, Sweden, the UK and there’s even a contributor from Australia, Gay Breyley, who examines texts by Lily Brett and Evelyn Crawford under the rubric of displaced Australian daughters.

This book began life as a special double-issue of the journal Prose Studies in 2003. I’ve never quite understood why an edition of a journal is republished as a book, especially as it’s often easier and cheaper to access journal papers than pay the cost of an imported book these days. But editor Cynthia Huff has obviously pulled this off, and good for her I say. The book varies from the journal only in so far as it has an index and ISBN. The introduction by the editor is exactly the same in the journal, replete with references to the special edition (we’re imagined to be reading) and even the same spelling mistakes. I’m sure these could have been fixed with very little effort. Perhaps this is the advantage of republishing a journal issue as a book – no editing allowed. Come to think of it, even the pages align exactly to the journal.

Casting aside publishing cynicism, the introduction by Cynthia Huff poses an ambitious vision for the book, claiming that women’s life writing offers an incomparable window to the world, and anticipating that the essays in the collection will be potentially life-changing. A foray into Huff’s biography tells us the story of her meeting some ‘international’ graduate students in London in the seventies, and gradually becoming aware of (and writing about) the ways they had to negotiate colonialism in Britain that she, as a US scholar, did not. This rather innocent encounter is in some ways emblematic of the introductory essay, which positions (theories of) women’s life writing in terms of another 1970s encounter with New Criticism. Providing us with the basic arguments which have developed this genre as one of theoretical and feminist interest over the past three decades, Huff briefly skims the surface of naming theorists and propositions which separate the genre from ‘the study of the lives of great men’. Benedict Anderson’s 1991 book, Imagined Communities, offers the other support for the collection’s theme, and his focus on nation-building is extended to the creation of other communities based on gender, ethnicity, place, ability and the imagination.

The chapters of this book are more complex in their engagement with current theoretical concerns, canvassing a range of feminist issues from trauma studies, whiteness, postcolonialism, diasporic studies, disability and queer theory. Many of them directly engage with Anderson’s concept of community and nation, and Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of borderlands emerges quite often as well. Many are sobering in their retrieval of the lives and texts of Jewish concentration camp survivors, refugees, Indigenous women, slaves and exiles. Other chapters focus on the political and the privileged, but it’s difficult to find a sense of relativism: the chapter by Jennifer Sinor discussing the agonised internet writing of affluent teenagers is still searing to read.

Susannah Mintz’s compelling chapter about the subjective ‘I’ of disability narratives - or autopathographies - engages with the multiple identities of women with disabilities who may also be mothers/lesbian/religious/political/ethnic. Some women, she notes, associate with unfriendly communities as disabilities are hierarchised or other aspects of subjectivity are not deemed compatible or acceptable. Margaretta Jolly’s discussion of the ways in which letter-writing functioned to create a community of women peace protesters at Greenham Common in the 1980s also addresses the ways in which fractures in that community are registered in the same way, as political and ideological positions clashed. The idea of returning to communities of the past in an effort to retrieve family stories and identities is named ‘reverse migrations’ by Manuela Costantino and Susanna Egan, who examine two such trips in the autobiographies of European immigrants to Canada. In another chapter, what it means to be Puerto Rican in the United States is understood to be the central concern of Esmeralda Santiago’s autobiographies. Jillian Sandell examines the imaginary inclusions and exclusions generated by anthologies of women’s writing, as Jane Gallop has famously done in the past. Her chapter specifically examines three anthologies by ‘women of color’ over three decades, beginning with Cherrié Morága and Gloria Anzaldúa’s edited collection, This Bridge Called My Back from 1981, and the ways they generate imagined communities by being taught as Women’s Studies texts. The final chapter by Jeanne Perreault provides a fine summary of American critical work on feminism and whiteness, and does all but remind us of the extent to which this collection is quite white despite its diversity.

The connections between contributors and their topic are often left up to the reader to imagine, which is quite commonplace and yet in a feminist collection I would have imagined the politics of location to be quite important. Certainly Leena Kurvet-Kaosaar’s chapter on Baltic women’s narratives of deportation are lent further credibility and narrative power when she describes the clacking on the computer keys of a ‘heavy silver ring of my grandmother’s best friend, who spent 25 arduous years in the diamond mines of Inta in the depths of Siberia’ where she was deported by Soviet forces. Jennifor Sinor positions herself as an outsider to the girl zines she researches. But maybe feminist scholarship has passed the need for those moments of personal disclosure, some of which are embarrassingly bad. I do find it ironic though that the only contribution from a Chaired Professor in the collection is a reflection (from the 1970s again) on the acquisition of ‘voice’ through personal testimony, albeit a fractured subject. Maybe this indicates that seniority provides the authority to include personal reflection.

Overall, this collection would be of interest to those doing academic work on autobiography or on imagined communities. But then, I’d probably just download the papers from Prose Studies that specifically interested me, and order the book for my library.

Alison Bartlett teaches Women’s Studies at the University of Western Australia. Her most recent book is Breastwork: Rethinking Breastfeeding (UNSW Press).