Auto/Biography across the Americas

Reviewed by: Auto/Biography across the Americas: Transnational Themes in Life Writing ed. by Ricia Anne Chansky Theresa A. Kulbaga (bio) Auto/Biography across the Americas: Transnational Themes in Life Writing Ricia Anne Chansky, editor Routledge, 2016, 268 pp. ISBN 9781138959972, $128 hardcover. ISBN 9780367875343, $48.95, paperback. The 2012 season of the popular reality television show Canada Reads—a competition that purports to select one book that all Canadians should read—featured three memoirs. The series follows a typical competition format: books are nominated by viewers, and their merits are subsequently debated on the show by celebrities, with one book per episode voted off until the "winner" remains. The 2012 competition erupted into a particularly heated debate over two of the three finalists, when Anne-France Goldwater suggested that Marina Nemat's Prisoner of Tehran was not strictly true and that Carmen Aguirre—author of the memoir Something Fierce, which eventually won the competition—was a terrorist. As Julie Rak argues in her contribution to the edited volume Auto/Biography Across the Americas: Transnational Themes in Life Writing, "Canada Reads stopped being a game-show about nationalist forms of reading and became the focus of a serious discussion about memoir, nationalism, and ethics," ultimately highlighting "the status of memoir as a transnational product" (54, 57). Something fierce, indeed. The controversy tested readers' and viewers' assumptions about truth in memoir, the autobiographical pact, and corresponding legalistic readings of authenticity and witness, what should or can be said in public, and what kind of literature counts as Canadian literature. The controversy involves entangled questions about nation, identity, migration, belonging, and who has the cultural authority to decide what constitutes truth—issues central to Ricia Anne Chansky's edited volume about "transnational themes in life writing." In Auto/Biography Across the Americas, Chansky has collected twelve thought-provoking essays focusing on "points of connectivity" (4), linking life writing across the Americas. Chansky argues that these narratives are characterized broadly by two key themes: movement and belonging. More generally, she argues that auto/biography studies would benefit from centering theories, narratives, and disciplinary perspectives that destabilize nationalist frameworks for understanding literature and identity. As Chansky puts it, in our contemporary moment, understandings of national identities are not stable; they are made, broken, and remade among the constant mutability of globalism. Recognizing the Western Hemisphere as a location built upon an interconnected history of mass movement . . . afford[s] us the tools to understand the self and the other as separate yet intertwined agents in the global arena. (15). The volume draws on the work of Indigenous scholars, scholars in Latin America and the Caribbean, and scholars working in decolonial and transnational American studies, to prompt new, interdisciplinary understandings of life writing. Ultimately, [End Page 652] Chansky and her contributors ask: How can we theorize multiple national taxonomies of power and oppression ethically and complexly? How do we recognize relationality and connectivity without collapsing all identities and experiences into a homogenous subject? How can autobiography studies benefit from a disruption of disciplinary norms and "the creolization of theory" (4)? To get at these questions, contributors offer various arguments about the problems and possibilities of movement and belonging in the Americas. Sidonie Smith proposes that we rethink agency to acknowledge "diverse networks of relationality," while keeping in mind Leela Fernandes's "ethics of risk" (21). Sandra Pouchet Paquet argues that Caribbean autobiography requires "reading across or beyond geographic and cultural divides," and that it is fundamentally "other-directed and manifests in dialogue with community" (113, 112). Laura J. Beard offers a compelling analysis of Cree women's life narratives, insisting that "recognition of literary and rhetorical sovereignty means that we do not impose critical terms from other cultural traditions in our readings of Indigenous texts" (127). And Sergio da Silva Barcellos contends that auto/biographical narratives play an important role "in building national identity and [that we] should situate them within the context of Brazilian national literary history" (198). One strength of Chansky's editorial approach is her careful attention to interdisciplinarity: this volume is characterized not just by work about transnational life narratives but also work by scholars across the Americas, from different scholarly and

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