This chapter argues that any critical or historical study of life-narrative, memoir, or autobiography by “gay Latino male” writers in the United States must attend to questions or problems unique to the intersecting fields of queer and Latinx literary studies. At the level of genre, such an analysis must address the decades-long influence of testimonio theory coursing through both Latin American and Latina/o/x literary studies as a destabilizing element in any discussion of genre as a tool for understanding literature, or “the literary” per se, especially in its grounding relationship to any claim to historical knowledge, through the modes of either fiction or nonfiction. At the level of gender, such an analysis must address the recent emergence of the self-interrogating mark of the “x” in Latinx (in the mid-2020s perhaps ceding finally to the “e” in Latine) as the refusal to accept the binary logic of gender as imbedded in the orthography and grammar of conventional Spanish. These considerations destabilize but do not disable the possibility of curating a collection of texts that have since the mid-twentieth century comprised an archive of “Gay Latino American Autobiography.”

This chapter argues that contemporary memoirs by gay men about transactional sex challenge assumptions that commercial and noncommercial sex divide into separate spheres, and that sex can be cleanly differentiated from other, mundane practices. While these memoirs contain many unambiguous depictions of transactional sex, they also depict moments where transactional arrangements yield intimacies that are far more difficult to categorize. In addition, they raise questions regarding where the “sex” in the sex trade both ends and begins.

This chapter explore five works of gay literary autobiographical writing about the 1970s. These autobiographies by Michael Rumaker, Robert Glück, Kevin Killian, Essex Hemphill, and Bernard Cooper paint an ambivalent picture of the decade, a period in which the unprecedented rewards and celebratory tenor of sexual liberation did not merely erase the traumas of the past: homophobia, self-hatred, and abusive relationships. Most of these writers are quite different from one another; they belonged to different gay cultural scenes and lived and worked in different cities across the US. By identifying shared themes across their work, however, this chapter illuminates why the 1970s was a pivotal moment in the formation of gay literature as we know it.

This chapter explores how victims have participated in unofficial transitional justice efforts involving non-state armed groups. Using the memoir of Seamus Kearney in the Northern Ireland context as a case study, we critically examine how victims participate in what we argue to be ‘quiet’ transitional justice efforts. Our discussion centres around two interlinked foci: the story told about how Kearney unofficially engaged with the Irish Republican Army in the pursuit of acknowledgement and truth; and how his memoir represents a participatory space where he leads in narrating the experience of ‘quiet’ transitional justice. Arguing that his memoir is, and contains, evidence of victim-led transitional justice, we juxtapose Kearney’s agency in the ‘quiet’ transitional justice process with his more passive role within formal truth recovery mechanisms. In doing so, we expand the transitional justice imagination on the place and role of victims beyond their engagement with formal mechanisms.

This chapter serves as an introduction to African Literature in Transition. The edited volume is intended to function as a compendium of histories of selected genres that have emerged in the written literature and other verbal arts of the African continent from at least the beginning of the twentieth century to the early twenty-first century. The introduction analyzes the role of genre as organizing principle for African literary history writ large both in the popular arts and in high literary forms. The primary argument of the chapter is that understanding African literary histories is not simply a matter of creating a record of what has been written and performed, but also a matter of surveying how and why particular types of African-authored texts have become more or less visible at different points in time through an examination of the role of genres. To advance this argument, the introduction focuses on the sub-categories of genre in African literature rather than the broad generic classifications of African literature such as the African novel, African poetry, or African drama. Equally, the chapter juxtaposes genres that are read mainly locally with those that are read both locally and outside Africa.

Realist narrative genres, such as memoir and autobiography, are the most prevalent women’s prison writing. Contemporary readers rely on these narrative elements in order to believe stories. However, when the writer disassociates during a traumatic event and does not remember details that would ground their telling in recognizable details, their narratives cannot reliably reference them. As incarcerated women authors grapple with what they’ve suffered and what they’ve done, their narratives inevitably intersect with social realities that form the background violence that created the conditions for the discrete, traumatic events of harmdoing. While carceral culture essentializes people into stagnant categories of worth – good/flawed, criminal/victim, innocent/guilty – incarcerated women’s stories show how facile these conceptions are, how much harm they cause, and that incarceration does nothing to address these issues and often actively prohibits healing.

This chapter offers the first comprehensive account of the tangential maritime figure of the sailor’s daughter. Though neglected in the scholarship, her life was shaped in material and emotional ways by the intermittent presence of a seafaring father and the complex gender dynamics that attended the composition of the maritime family. With reference to a unique and overlooked corpus of memoirs by working-class women raised in seafaring families within the Victorian and Edwardian periods, the chapter returns to myth of the ‘sailor in the family’, presented in Chapter 1, but this time from the sidelong perspective of the daughter. The analysis shows how these memoirs disrupt the paradigmatic model of the dutiful sailor’s daughter in narratives that set out the compromises, strange intimacies, and frustrations of childhoods shaped by the maritime world. While the sailor-fathers described in the memoirs belong to the late nineteenth century, the book concludes by arguing that it is the writerly daughter’s insurgent account that carries new perspectives on maritime relations into the twentieth century.

The presentation of the Commission on Caporetto final report to Parliament, in 1919, marked the end of Cadorna’s career and public life. But not the end of a new battle for his reputation. His monumental account of his own performance as commander, published in 1921 (War on the Italian Front), was a first rejoinder to what he saw as a campaign of vituperation with the blessing and backing of governments in Rome. This quarrelsome, bitter struggle was ended by Fascism. The regime was eager to patch up the old rifts of civil war (meaning 1914, but also 1919–1922); above all, it sought to gather as much consensus as it could. The time had come, it decided, to quell all controversy surrounding the ‘Cadorna affair’. On 4th November 1924 the former Chief was raised to the new top rank in the army. It must be said that the aged general keenly appreciated the honours bestowed on him by the new war-mongering fascist Italy. But the long civil war, setting in on the heels of world conflict, triggered a process of hypostatization, turning him into an icon, a paladin, or an insensitive, blood-thirsty criminal.

Percy Shelley once joked, ‘self, that burr that will stick to one. I can’t get it off yet’. But a burr, if annoying, often carries seeds. That ‘self’ abided with those he left behind. The crop of major biographies and memoirs of Shelley written during the period 1823–78 came from those who knew him. While their portraits are often consistent in details, each offers a different facet of a chameleonic figure. This chapter surveys some of the Shelleys from which one might choose.

Just as Song of Solomon and Down These Mean Streets inspired Junot Díaz to become a writer, Youngblood (1954), a novel by the radical African American author John Oliver Killens, inspired Piri Thomas to write Down These Mean Streets (1967). What does Thomas’s personal relationship with Killens reveal about the intertextual relationship between DTMS and Youngblood? What can we learn from reading DTMS as a coming-of-age memoir rather than as a coming-of-age novel? What can be gained by reading DTMS from a child-centered perspective? Inspired by Ralph Ellison’s concept of literary ancestry, Harold Bloom’s theory of the anxiety of influence, Gerard Genette’s definition of intertextuality, and Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s theory of signifying, I argue that the shared themes of racial, sexual, and gendered trauma intertextually bind the homosocial coming-of-age narratives in DTMS and Youngblood. I examine how the coming-of-age narratives in each of these texts explore the entanglement of homosocial camaraderie and ethnic, racial, and sexual identity formation. In critically explicating these themes, this chapter expands Latino American and African American literary history and reveals new insights about the intertextual genealogy of influence between DTMS and Youngblood.

This chapter examines forms of self-writing (memoir, autobiography, diaries, documentary prose, and other in-between genres) that demonstrate an ‘orientation toward authenticity’, to borrow the phrase of the writer-scholar Lidiia Ginzburg. The arc spans the late seventeenth century to the present, with a focus on the period from the end of World War II to the late Soviet era, which witnessed an explosion of non-fictional narratives to document the war, camps, and Stalinist terror. The chapter takes its cues from Ginzburg’s theory that in-between prose is uniquely innovative when it fixes its attention on concepts of the self and literary forms, and that it flourishes most when canonical genres are in flux. In addition to the topic of childhood and, more centrally, personal encounters with history, the chapter discusses the role of women writers, and the sub-genre of the memoirs of contemporaries written by members of the intelligentsia.

Twentieth-century critics have opposed the supposed objectivity of the essay to the letter and diary as private, self-expressive, and autobiographical genres. But this was a modern development. From Michel de Montaigne to the early nineteenth century, the essay, the letter, and the diary were more alike and far more closely aligned than they later became, particularly with regard to representations of the self and notions of publicity. For instance, they were all considered forms of address, and means of presenting one’s intellectual physiognomy to others that were likely to be read aloud, shared, and discussed. This chapter therefore explores now-forgotten family resemblances among these genres both in form and function and concludes by showing where they were fused or embedded in one another.

This chapter traces queer and trans North American memoir through the long twentieth century by engaging the reality that for the majority of people in the majority of that period sexual identities did not adhere in a straight/gay binary and gender identities did not adhere in a cis/trans binary. To answer the challenge posed by this historical reality, this chapter proposes a theory of queer and trans memoir rooted in the racializing and classed gendering regimes and sexual arrangements of the period. This theory then guides the chapter through its engagement with the minoritized works of queer and trans memoir, skirting the white bourgeois gay male genealogy from Oscar Wilde to Edmund White that has too often been proffered as the geneology of LGBT literature.

This chapter examines the representation of illness and impairment in various works of fiction, poetry, and memoir to demonstrate the creative possibilities of disability. Where literary uses of disability have historically been thought to denote suffering, corruption, social failure, or inspirational and redemptive lessons aimed at non-disabled readers, recent scholarship has explored disability’s generative relation to structures of plot and to poetics as well as its epistemological effects, constituting new forms of knowledge. The chapter spotlights three texts that explicitly challenge tropes of deviance and lack and foreground bodymind anomalousness as the source of creative expression and knowing.