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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 January 2010
The growing number of academic autobiographies published in recent years has sparked interesting debates on the nature and function of life writing. We now grapple with the question of the degrees to which autobiographical and professional writing function in conjunction – if we can read autobiographical writing from professional perspectives or, alternatively, to what extent scholarship grows from personal experiences. This approach to the academic autobiography links our notions about processes of self-inscription to the forms of production of historical and cultural knowledge. This essay examines these ideas by reading Shirley Geok-lin Lim's Among the White Moon Faces (1997). Lim's literary and scholarly production superlatively illustrates the development of contemporary perspectives on national identity and language, migration, and homelands. Her work, which includes poetry collections, novels, short stories, academic studies and a memoir – compels readers to engage the interplay between the competing forces of race, ethnicity, gender, and nationality within spaces that embody these conflicts. I argue that a comparative reading of personal and professional narratives invites us to reconsider how, working within specific epistemic contexts, academics like Lim consciously negotiate the intersection between personal history and academic commitment, a vital subtext in their autobiographical performance.
1 Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian American Memoir of Homelands (New York: The Feminist Press, 1996). All subsequent references to this memoir will be cited parenthetically within the text.
2 Jeremy D. Popkin, History, Historians, and Autobiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
3 Aurell, Jaume, “Autobiographical Texts as Historiographical Sources: Rereading Fernand Braudel and Annie Kriegel,” Biography, 29, 3 (2006), 425–45, 426, original emphasis.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See the special issue of Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, “Academic Autobiography and/in the Discourses of History”, 13, 1 (2009), edited by Jaume Aurell and myself, for further discussion of this topic.
4 Quoted in Jerome Klinkowitz, Rosenberg, Barthes, Hassan: The Postmodern Habit of Thought (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1988), 118.
5 Jill Ker Conway, True North: A Memoir (New York: Vintage Books, 1994); Alice Kaplan, French Lessons: A Memoir (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Leila Ahmed, A Border Passage: From Cairo to America – A Woman's Journey (New York: Penguin, 1999). Other important academic autobiographies by women include Nancy K. Miller's Bequest and Betrayal (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000); Marianne De Marco Torgovnic's Crossing Ocean Parkway (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); and Jane Tompkins's A Life in School: What the Teacher Learned (New York: Basic Books, 1997).
6 Hall, Jacqueline Dowd, “‘You Must Remember This’: Autobiography as Social Critique,” Journal of American History, 85, 2 (1998), 439–65, 441.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
7 Miller, Nancy K., “Public Statements, Private Lives: Academic Memoirs for the Nineties,” Signs, 22, 4 (1997), 981–1015, 982.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
8 Helen Buss, Repossessing the World: Reading Memoirs by Contemporary Women (Toronto: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2002), 176.
9 Many of the arguments I make about the connections between Lim's memoir and her scholarly work could reasonably be made about the links between her creative writing and her memoir. Because of space constraints, I will focus only on the scholarship in this paper.
10 Shirley Geok-lin Lim, “Immigration and Diaspora,” in King-kok Cheung, ed., An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 289, 299.
11 Quayum, Mohammed A., “Shirley Geok-lin Lim: An Interview,” MELUS, 28, 4 (2003), 83–100, 96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
12 Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Writing Southeast/Asia in English: Against the Grain (London: Skoob Pacifica, 1994), xi–xii.
13 Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Nationalism and Literature: Literature in English from the Philippines and Singapore (Quezon City: New Day Publishers, 1993), iii.
14 The book's Singapore edition, published the same year, is subtitled Memoirs of a Nyonya Feminist. This title has specific ethnic and political connotations in Malaysia and Singapore that are lost in an American edition. As Pin-chia Feng explains, though the differences reflect publishers' marketing concerns, they also display “her different locational identities – she is a Nyonya, ‘a Malayan-native Chinese woman’ just like her mother …; a feminist who breaks away from tradition in Malaysia; and an Asian American who is negotiating with her many homelands in the United States. The identity of ‘Shirley Geok-lin Lim’ is changing as she is writing about herself in different geographical locations, and these changes best exemplify her diasporic identity that is at once fluid and creolized.” Feng, Pin-chia, “National History and Transnational Narration: Feminist Body Politics in Shirley Geok-Lin Lim's Joss and Gold,” Contemporary Women's Writing, 1, 1–2 (2007), 135–50, 141CrossRefGoogle Scholar; internal reference omitted.
15 Lim, Shirley Geok-lin, “First World ‘Expats’ and Expatriate Writing in a Third World Frame,” New Literatures Review, 28/29 (1994–95), 1–22Google Scholar; idem, “Feminist and Ethnic Literary Theories in Asian American Literature,” Feminist Studies, 19, 3 (1993), 571–96; idem, “Affiliation, Exile, and A-filiation: Migrant and Global Literatures,” in Mary Ann Caws and Christopher Pendergast, eds., HarperCollins World Reader (New York: Harper Collins, 1993); idem, “Asian American Feminism and Anglo-American Hegemony: Living in the Funny House,” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, 12, 2 (1993), 279–87; idem, “Asian American Writers in Search of Self-Definition,” MELUS 13, 1–2 (1986), 57–78.
16 Shirley Geok-lin Lim, “The Tradition of Chinese American Women's Life Stories: Thematics of Race and Gender in Jade Snow Wong's Fifth Chinese Daughter and Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior,” in Margo Culley, ed., American Women's Autobiography: Fea(s)ts of Memory (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992); idem, “Japanese American Women's Life Stories: Maternality in Monica Sone's Nisei Daughter and Joy Kogawa's Obasan,” Feminist Studies, 16, 2 (1990), 289–312; idem, ed., Approaches to Teaching Kingston's The Woman Warrior (New York: Modern Language Association, 1991).
17 Miller, “Public Statements,” 983.
18 Sullivan, Jim, “Book Review: Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian American Memoir of Homelands by Shirley Geok-Lin Lim,” Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 29, 2 (2000), 259–62, 260.Google Scholar
19 Whitlock, Gillian, “Disciplining the Child: Recent British Academic Memoir,” A/B: Auto/Biography Studies, 19, 1–2 (2004), 46–58, 47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
20 Sue-Im Lee, “Asian Americans and the Academe: Shirley Lim's Among the White Moon Faces,” Unpublished paper presented at the Society for the Study of American Women Writers Conference, Philadelphia, October 2006.
21 Miller, 991–92.
22 Leow, Joanne, “Monolingual Exile: Language, Autobiography and Exteriority in Shirley Lim,” Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, 6, 2 (2007), available at http://www.qlrs.com/essay.asp?id=581 (accessed 10 April 2008).Google Scholar
23 Shirley Geok-lin Lim, “Chinese Ba, British Da: Daughterhood as Schizophrenia,” in Shirley Chew and Anna Rutherford, eds., Unbecoming Daughters of the Empire (Sydney: Dangaroo Press, 1993), 142.
24 Tay, Eddie, “Hegemony, National Allegory, Exile: The Poetry of Shirley Lim,” Textual Practice, 19, 3 (2005), 289–308, 302.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
25 Ironically perhaps, Among the White Moon Faces, which engages precisely this ambivalence, won the American Book Award in 1997.
26 Shirley Neuman, “Autobiography: From Different Poetics to a Poetics of Difference,” in Marlene Kadar, ed., Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 223, original emphasis.
27 See my article “Academic Autobiography as Women's History: Jill Ker Conway's True North and Leila Ahmed's A Border Passage,” Rethinking History, 13, 1 (March 2009), 109–23, for further examples of this idea.
28 Shirley Geok-lin Lim, “The Ambivalent American: Asian American Literature on the Cusp,” in Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Amy Ling, eds., Reading the Literatures of Asian America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 13.
29 Buss, Repossessing the World, 177.
30 Lim, “First World ‘Expats’,” 18.
31 Aurell, “Autobiographical Texts as Historiographical Sources,” 442, original emphasis.
