Auto-biography and mediation

The essays by American, Asian, Australian and European critics collected here demonstrate the opening up of auto/biography studies to the border-crossing implied by the concept of mediation: processes of social and cultural translation are examined in various forms – from photographic self-representation to oral histories – and practices, from media coverage through marketing of written lives to performing the self. These essays reveal that auto/biography goes much further than the narrow examination of an individual’s life; for instance, life narratives intersect human rights in post-Apartheid South Africa, genomics is haunted by the structure of eugenics, and quilting can reveal a material history to those who can decode it. In mediating these lives, the essays ask us to engage with diverse questions of ethics, gender politics, postcolonial critique, institutional frameworks, and the basic question of how acts of mediation influence the telling and re-telling of lives.