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Brown Bag Biography: Jack Taylor

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The Center for Biographical Research presents: Thursday, October 30th: Jack Taylor, "Tensions in Survivor Narratives From Rwanda: Life-Writing and Memory" Jack Taylor is an associate professor in the Department of English where he teaches African, African American, and American Literature. Cosponsored by Peacebuilding LLC, the Center for Oral History, the School of Communication and Information, and the Departments of Anthropology, English, Ethnic Studies, and Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies. Location: Kuykendall 410 Time: 12:00–1:15 pm HST This talk examines how various modes of life-writing responded to, and represented, the Rwandan genocide through different aesthetic forms, styles, and modes of address. I anchor this talk in three memoirs: Clemantine Wamariya and Elizabeth Weil’s The Girl who Smiled Beads, Marie Béatrice Umutesi Surviving the Slaughter: The Ordeal of a Rwandan Refugee in Zaire, and Yolande Mukagasana’s Not My Time to Die. I argue, in part through a paratextual reading, how these survivor narratives provide first-hand accounts to divulge the tension between individual survivors’ subjectivity and livelihood that are both particular and representative of a collective, simultaneously unique in their singularity yet synecdochic in their representative praxis and readerly interpretation. By analyzing the dialectics memory and forgetting, I provide insights into refugee subjectivity and livelihood. The remembrance, retelling, and inscription in writing (memoir), are subsequently imagined by the reader with the goal of producing a shared historical imaginary of refugee livelihood that has profound ethical implications.

Event Sponsor
Center for Biographical Research, Mānoa Campus

More Information
Carson Compos, 8089563774, brownbag@hawaii.edu