International Auto/Biography Association (Website )

Where: University of Hawai`i at Manoa, East-West Center’s Imin Center, Honolulu
When: June 23-26, 2008
Information

Keynote speakers for the conference: Philippe Lejeune, Noenoe Silva, Barbara Harlow and Alicia Partony
Participation (among others): Julia Watson, John Eakin, Sidonie Smith, Leigh Gilmore, G. Thomas Couser, Margaretta Jolly, Zhao Baisheng, Susanna Egan, Bella Brodzki

Philippe Lejeune has agreed to come, and will be giving his keynote in French.

Noenoe Silva will represent the Pacific, this conference’s region. A Hawaiian political scientist and language scholar, she recently published a book with Duke University Press on language and resistance to colonialism in Hawai’i. Her current work centers on writing the biographies and identifying the anonymous writing of the Hawaiian editors and writers for the newspapers in the 19th century.

Barbara Harlow, who works on resistance literature and life writing in such trouble spots as the Middle East, South Africa, and Northern Ireland, will talk about the politics of translation and life writing.

Alicia Partnoy, a survivor of the secret detention camps where about 30,000 Argentineans „disappeared,“ is the author of The Little School: Tales of Disappearance and Survival, and of the poetry collections Little Low Flying/Volando bajito, and Revenge of the Apple/Venganza de la manzana. She also edited You Can’t Drown the Fire: Latin American Women Writing in Exile.

Each day we will be holding general keynote panels, attended by everyone, with three or four scholars speaking on a particular topic of strong interest to people in life writing.