Sidonie Smith is the Lorna G. Goodison Distinguished University Professor of English and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan. She is a past-President of the Modern Language Association of America (2010). She received her BA and MA in English Literature from the University of Michigan and her PhD from Case Western Reserve University. She taught at Roosevelt University, the University of Arizona, and Binghamton University before returning to the University of Michigan in 1996. Phone: 734-936-3518 Address: 202 S. Thayer
Ann Arbor, MI 48104-1608
Life writing, autoethnography, digital life writing, witnessing, metrics of authenticity, women's... more Life writing, autoethnography, digital life writing, witnessing, metrics of authenticity, women's autobiography, autobiography studies
A toolkit of questions useful in the interpretation of texts and practices of life writing, memoi... more A toolkit of questions useful in the interpretation of texts and practices of life writing, memoir, and autobiography.
Personal narratives have become one of the most potent vehicles for advancing human rights claims... more Personal narratives have become one of the most potent vehicles for advancing human rights claims across the world. These two contemporary domains, personal narrative and human rights, literature and international politics, are commonly understood to operate on separate planes. This study however, examines the ways these intersecting realms unfold and are enfolded in one another in ways both productive of and problematic for the achievement of social justice. Human Rights and Narrated Lives explores what happens when autobiographical narratives are produced, received, and circulated in the field of human rights. It asks how personal narratives emerge in local settings; how international rights discourse enables and constrains individual and collective subjectivities in narration; how personal narratives circulate and take on new meanings in new contexts; and how and under what conditions they feed into, affect, and are affected by the reorganizations of politics in the post cold war, postcolonial, globalizing human rights contexts. To explore these intersections, the authors attend the production, circulation, reception, and affective currents of stories in action across local, national, transnational, and global arenas. They do so by looking at five case studies: in the context of the Truth and Reconciliation processes in South Africa; the National Inquiry into the Forced Removal of Indigenous Children from their Families in Australia; activism on behalf of former 'comfort women' from South/East Asia; U.S. prison activism; and democratic reforms in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square Massacre in China.
From résumés to personal ads, from talk shows to self-help groups, autobiographical storytelling... more From résumés to personal ads, from talk shows to self-help groups, autobiographical storytelling has become a central theme of American culture. Getting a Life is an innovative examination of how personal narratives have become central in circulating multiple, overlapping, provisional identities-and how those identities are negotiated or resisted in everyday life. Contributors: Linda Martin Alcoff, Philip E. Baruth, H-Dirksen L. Bauman, Michael Blitz, Traci Carroll, William Chaloupka, Salome Chasnoff, Kay K. Cook, Martin A. Danahay, Laura Gray-Rosendale, Linda S. Kauffman, Louise Krasniewicz, Helena Michie, Sandra Patton, Janice Peck, Robyn R. Warhol, Susan Ostrov Weisser.
Looks at the complexities of identity in the context of contemporary European culture. The essays... more Looks at the complexities of identity in the context of contemporary European culture. The essays in Writing New Identities address the changing notions of community that the New Europe faces as a result of the large numbers of immigrants and migrant workers seeking work and refuge within its borders.
Life writing, autoethnography, digital life writing, witnessing, metrics of authenticity, women's... more Life writing, autoethnography, digital life writing, witnessing, metrics of authenticity, women's autobiography, autobiography studies
A toolkit of questions useful in the interpretation of texts and practices of life writing, memoi... more A toolkit of questions useful in the interpretation of texts and practices of life writing, memoir, and autobiography.
Personal narratives have become one of the most potent vehicles for advancing human rights claims... more Personal narratives have become one of the most potent vehicles for advancing human rights claims across the world. These two contemporary domains, personal narrative and human rights, literature and international politics, are commonly understood to operate on separate planes. This study however, examines the ways these intersecting realms unfold and are enfolded in one another in ways both productive of and problematic for the achievement of social justice. Human Rights and Narrated Lives explores what happens when autobiographical narratives are produced, received, and circulated in the field of human rights. It asks how personal narratives emerge in local settings; how international rights discourse enables and constrains individual and collective subjectivities in narration; how personal narratives circulate and take on new meanings in new contexts; and how and under what conditions they feed into, affect, and are affected by the reorganizations of politics in the post cold war, postcolonial, globalizing human rights contexts. To explore these intersections, the authors attend the production, circulation, reception, and affective currents of stories in action across local, national, transnational, and global arenas. They do so by looking at five case studies: in the context of the Truth and Reconciliation processes in South Africa; the National Inquiry into the Forced Removal of Indigenous Children from their Families in Australia; activism on behalf of former 'comfort women' from South/East Asia; U.S. prison activism; and democratic reforms in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square Massacre in China.
From résumés to personal ads, from talk shows to self-help groups, autobiographical storytelling... more From résumés to personal ads, from talk shows to self-help groups, autobiographical storytelling has become a central theme of American culture. Getting a Life is an innovative examination of how personal narratives have become central in circulating multiple, overlapping, provisional identities-and how those identities are negotiated or resisted in everyday life. Contributors: Linda Martin Alcoff, Philip E. Baruth, H-Dirksen L. Bauman, Michael Blitz, Traci Carroll, William Chaloupka, Salome Chasnoff, Kay K. Cook, Martin A. Danahay, Laura Gray-Rosendale, Linda S. Kauffman, Louise Krasniewicz, Helena Michie, Sandra Patton, Janice Peck, Robyn R. Warhol, Susan Ostrov Weisser.
Looks at the complexities of identity in the context of contemporary European culture. The essays... more Looks at the complexities of identity in the context of contemporary European culture. The essays in Writing New Identities address the changing notions of community that the New Europe faces as a result of the large numbers of immigrants and migrant workers seeking work and refuge within its borders.
The life narratives in this collection are by ethnically diverse women of energy and ambition-som... more The life narratives in this collection are by ethnically diverse women of energy and ambition-some well known, some forgotten over generations—who confronted barriers of gender, class, race, and sexual difference as they pursued or adapted to adventurous new lives in a rapidly changing America. The engaging selections—from captivity narratives to letters, manifestos, criminal confessions, and childhood sketches—span a hundred years in which women increasingly asserted themselves publicly. Some rose to positions of prominence as writers, activists, and artists; some sought education or wrote to support themselves and their families; some transgressed social norms in search of new possibilities. Each woman's story is strikingly individual, yet the brief narratives in this anthology collectively chart bold new visions of women's agency.
... "South African Women Demand the Truth." In What Women Do in Wartime: Gender and Con... more ... "South African Women Demand the Truth." In What Women Do in Wartime: Gender and Conflict in Africa, edited by Meredeth Turshen and Clotilde Twagiramariya, 2761. ... Comfort Woman: A Filipina's Story of Prostitution and Slavery under the Japanese Military. ...
At this historical moment, the human rights regime is the primary global project for managing inj... more At this historical moment, the human rights regime is the primary global project for managing injustice and immiseration around the world (Farmer 2003,49), and life stories are at once ground and grist of rights work, rights instrumentalities, and rights politics. This conjunction of life narration, broadly defined, and contemporary human rights activisms, is indeed, as Kay Schaffer and I argue in Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition, a productive and problematic yoking of the decidedly intimate with the global.' Since the language of human rights is the contemporary lingua franca for addressing the problem of suffering (Ignatieff 2001, 7), the attachment of personal storytelling to the discourse and the institutions of the human rights regime enables survivors of and witnesses to injury and harm to make their grievances public and to draw attention to specific environments of suffering around the world. At the same time, this yoking of personal narrative and international rights politics affects the kinds of life stories and the narrative subject positions that can gain a global audience. Take, for instance, the post-Cold War resurgence of ethnic nationalism, with the attendant reorganization of politics in Eastern Europe, that has set large numbers of people in motion-into refugee camps, resettlement programs, and diasporic communities in receiving nations such as the United States. Under violent assault, displaced, haunted by traumatic memories, members of ethnic communities turn to life storytelling to extend global recognition of the violence unleashed against people on the basis of their ethnic identification. Their acts of narration emerge out of local contexts of rights violations. But to the extent that local movements "go international," these witnesses participate through their storytelling in global processes that create a climate for the intelligibility, reception, and recognition of new stories about ethnicity under assault. Gillian Whitlock calls this breakthrough to public attention a "discursive threshold" (2000,144). Through their stories of ethnic suffering, witnesses expose the violence inflicted by those pursuing the project of ethnic nationalism as a goal of state formation. They also reveal the complexities and conundrums involved in telling stories of ethnic difference and grievance through frameworks and institutions founded on the concept of abstract universality. For many witnesses, the embeddedness of stories of ethnic suffering in the discourses, institutions, and practices of the human rights regime provides the previously unheard and invisible a narrative framework, a context and occasion, an audience, and a subject position from which to makes claims. And yet, in order to circulate their stories within the global circuits of the human rights regime and bring crises of violence and suffering to a larger public, witnesses give their stories over to journalists, publishers, publicity agents, marketers, and rights activists whose framings of personal narratives participate in the commodification of suffering, the reification of the universalized subject position of innocent victim, and the displacement of historical complexity by the feel-good opportunities of empathetic identification. This case of personal storytelling in the regime of human rights suggests how it is that life narration reproduces, is animated by, and contributes to a paradox at the heart of human rights discourse and practice: the uneasy enfolding of the universal in the ethnic particular. Elicited, framed, produced, circulated, and received within the contemporary regime of human rights, the life story of ethnic suffering at once ennobles an authentic (and sentimentalized) voice of suffering and depersonalizes that voice precisely because of the commodification of suffering in the global flows of the human rights regime. Emerging from a local site of ethnic struggle, the story enters the Westerndominated global circuits, through which it can lose its local specificity. …
... Where I'm bound: Patterns of slavery and freedom in Black American autobiography. Post a... more ... Where I'm bound: Patterns of slavery and freedom in Black American autobiography. Post a Comment. CONTRIBUTORS: Author: Smith, Sidonie. PUBLISHER: Greenwood Press (Westport, Conn). SERIES TITLE: YEAR: 1974. PUB TYPE: Book (ISBN 083717337X ). ...
... Island. Mandela remembers the scene as" a happy, if slightly Page 68. 54 ... 81). Ot... more ... Island. Mandela remembers the scene as" a happy, if slightly Page 68. 54 ... 81). Others distrusted Mandela's moves toward rival groups, especially the conservative Inkatha Freedom Party under the direction of Chief Buthelezi. 2 ...
... She explores these issues of translation, fidelity, and generic negotiations of representivit... more ... She explores these issues of translation, fidelity, and generic negotiations of representivity through a reading of Omprakash Valmiki's Joothan. Analyzing translations of and publicity materials surrounding Joothan and its genre ...
Indigenous Australian Voices presents artwork, prose, and poetry of thirty-six contemporary Abori... more Indigenous Australian Voices presents artwork, prose, and poetry of thirty-six contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers and artists from the offshore islands, the Northern Territory, and all six states of Australia. It brings together, for the first time, little-known writings by men and women who capture the diversity of their lifestyles and perspectives in a far more compelling way than better-known accounts of anthropologists and travellers.
Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, May 1, 2011
Good evening, colleagues and friends. Tonight I have the honor of talking with you about my decid... more Good evening, colleagues and friends. Tonight I have the honor of talking with you about my decided passion, narrating lives. Emerging from dispersed global locations, circulated for difering purposes, life narration moves along predictable and unpredictable routes to publics and to archives near and far. High forms and low forms. Long forms and short forms. Lyric forms and documentary forms. Narrated lives in the irst, second, third, and plural persons. Life stories in print, comics, photography, ilm, and Second Life.
Personal narratives have become one of the most potent vehicles for advancing human rights claims... more Personal narratives have become one of the most potent vehicles for advancing human rights claims across the world. This text explores what happens when autobiographical narratives are produced, received and circulated in the field of human rights.1. Conjunctions : life narratives in the field of human rights -- 2. The venues of storytelling -- 3. Truth, reconciliation, and the traumatic past of South Africa -- 4. Indigenous human rights in Australia : who speaks for the stolen generations? -- 5. Belated narrating : 'grandmothers' telling stories of forced sexual slavery during World War II -- 6. Life sentences : narrated lives and prisoner rights in the United States -- 7. Post-Tiananmen narratives and the New China
Autobiographical narration has been a vital, capacious, often conventional and often renegade gen... more Autobiographical narration has been a vital, capacious, often conventional and often renegade genre of writing in the United States. Something about the " American " experience keeps inviting people to tell their stories in all kinds of forms and media. The genres of life narrative include captivity narrative, slave narrative, conversion narrative, spiritual autobiography, graphic memoir, testimonial, coming-of-age story, recovery narrative, autoethnography, ecobiography, to name only a few. And new media of autobiographical storytelling include performance art, cartoon, serial photography. We'll explore the emergence of autobiographical narration in colonial America. We'll track suspicion about the " truth " of autobiographical stories back to the Nineteenth Century and concern about the witnessing presented in slave narratives. Then we'll explore the ways in which life narrators have conceptualized, negotiated, contested, fractured, and reconstituted selves in writing. We'll consider the contemporary commodification of life stories and their circulation in global flows. And we'll conclude by exploring why recent autobiographical hoaxes, such as James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, matter to people. Themes of engagement will include the fables of American national identity, " Americanization, " transnational America, generational America, and the " spaces " of America, among others. Our aims will be: to analyze classic and contemporary life stories by selected writers and consider the kinds of " selves " they present; to learn frameworks for understanding self-representation and for relating the narrated self to myths and models of national identity; to relate individual life narratives to collective stories of gender and ethnicity, as well as nation; to explore how online virtual media are reconfiguring
Personal narratives have become one of the most potent vehicles for advancing political agendas w... more Personal narratives have become one of the most potent vehicles for advancing political agendas within the United States and elsewhere around the world. These two domains, personal narration and politics, are commonly understood to operate on separate planes. In this course we will explore the ways these intersecting realms unfold and are enfolded in one another in ways both productive of and problematic for the achievement of political ends, sometimes political candidacy, sometimes social justice. We will be examining what happens when autobiographical narratives are produced, received, and circulated in the context of political activities: human rights campaigns, U.S. electoral politics, and grassroots organizing. We will be asking how personal narratives emerge in local, national, and international contexts; how political discourse enables and constrains individual and collective subjectivities in narration; what genres of the autobiographical facilitate or impede political projects; how personal narratives circulate and take on new meanings in new contexts; and how and under what conditions they feed into, affect, and are affected by the reorganization of politics in post-cold war, postcolonial, and globalizing contexts. In other words, we'll ponder whose narratives find readers in what markets.
This course explores the ways in which people tell stories about experiential histories of illnes... more This course explores the ways in which people tell stories about experiential histories of illness, impairment, and bodily and mental transformation. We will explore how to approach autobiographical narratives and then read autobiographical narratives and graphic memoirs of cancer, addiction, transition, mental illness, etc. Readings will include texts from the 1980s and 90s, such as Lorde's Cancer Journal; Kaysen's Girl Interrupted (about a young woman's incarceration for mental illness); and more recent texts, including Bornstein's A Queer and Pleasant Danger (about transgender and transition) and Forney's Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me: A Graphic Memoir. We will look at the work of women artists visualizing a narrative of their bodies; at films/videos about gendered experiences of bodies; and we'll explore emergent practices of social media such as the autobiographical game Dys-4-ia. We will read Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks to explore the politics of genetic science and the politics of writing a life story of that science. And we will read scholarly articles that provide theoretical avenues for understanding what is at stake when the gendered body comes under the gaze of the medical establishment and when people engage in complex autobiographical acts to shock, educate, heal, survive, mourn, or critique the medicalization of the gendered body at the intersections of race, ethnicity, and sexuality. Written work will include short analytical projects; essays on specific texts; and a final project. This course will be of interest to students in Women's Studies and Premed studies as well as students in literature and language departments.
WS 530: Feminist Theory Course description: This course provides an introduction to topics, issue... more WS 530: Feminist Theory Course description: This course provides an introduction to topics, issues, and controversies engaging contemporary feminist theorists. Readings are organized under broad rubrics designed to provoke interdisciplinary conversations and lines of inquiry that undo traditional boundaries between the disciplines and between the Humanities, Social Sciences and the Sciences. Collectively, they also offer a range of theoretical and philosophical perspectives. The course is not designed to provide a comprehensive overview of all disciplinary or interdisciplinary paradigms in the field. Rather it is designed to introduce students to some of the key debates that are shaping interdisciplinary conversations and to provide opportunities for students to participate in local, national, and international conversations that are taking place in the field of Women's Studies. We will discuss the methodological and disciplinary approaches of the works we read as well as question the disciplinary assumptions that shape interdisciplinary theories.
In this course, we will be doubly focused. The primary focus will be on preparing a publishable e... more In this course, we will be doubly focused. The primary focus will be on preparing a publishable essay. Students will choose a paper or dissertation chapter they are interested in revising and submitting for publication. We will spend several weeks on a series of exercises: charting theoretical and methodological threads and issues; preparing an abstract; crafting a compelling introduction; naming and claiming the extent of the argument. We will workshop each essay. At the end of the course, everyone will present a fifteen-minute version of the paper and submit the essay to a journal. A second focus of the course will be a more broad-based discussion of the work of a humanities scholar in the next decades, including the transformation from scholarly publishing to scholarly communication. We will read targeted essays and blogs on the following issues: the state of scholarly publishing in the humanities; the new modes and media of scholarly communication; the venues and politics of open access; and the scholar as curator.
An undergraduate minicourse on two graphic memoirs: Alison Bechdel's Fun Home and JB Tran's Vietn... more An undergraduate minicourse on two graphic memoirs: Alison Bechdel's Fun Home and JB Tran's Vietnamerica
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Books by Sidonie Smith
Contributors: Linda Martin Alcoff, Philip E. Baruth, H-Dirksen L. Bauman, Michael Blitz, Traci Carroll, William Chaloupka, Salome Chasnoff, Kay K. Cook, Martin A. Danahay, Laura Gray-Rosendale, Linda S. Kauffman, Louise Krasniewicz, Helena Michie, Sandra Patton, Janice Peck, Robyn R. Warhol, Susan Ostrov Weisser.
Anthologies by Sidonie Smith
Contributors: Linda Martin Alcoff, Philip E. Baruth, H-Dirksen L. Bauman, Michael Blitz, Traci Carroll, William Chaloupka, Salome Chasnoff, Kay K. Cook, Martin A. Danahay, Laura Gray-Rosendale, Linda S. Kauffman, Louise Krasniewicz, Helena Michie, Sandra Patton, Janice Peck, Robyn R. Warhol, Susan Ostrov Weisser.