Guest Editorial Note: Women’s Autobiography in South Asia and the Middle East

In her article for this special issue on “Women’s Autobiography in South Asia and the Middle East,” historian Anshu Malhotra listens closely to a poetic work by the nineteenth-century north Indian prostitute turned spiritual novitiate Piro. Malhotra’s analysis of Piro’s poetic voice explores the microcosmic interstices of female agency as Piro’s world was entering the era of late colonial modernity. Women’s and gender history as a trans-cultural and by now global enterprise is built on such moments of listening to subjects in history, as it also attends to the macrocosmic conditions and shifts that have enabled and constrained such voices. Autobiographical writing, a mode of expression that has often made historians nervous, offers a rich if elusive archive for historical analysis, just as feminist biography as an analytic framework has been recognized, in the Journal of Women’s History and elsewhere, as a dynamic and generative zone of historical work. To consider autobiography through gendered lenses, as we do here, is to think through issues that face historians of women and gender constantly: not only agency and voice, but also self-definition, relationality, and the individual’s connections to specificities of time and place.

The study of autobiography and gender has proliferated in the academy. It is a constellation that brings together issues of identity and performativity, the narrating I and the evasiveness of the gendered self, genre, and canonicity, and the intersectionality of gender, place, ethnicity, class, and embodiment in rhetorics of individualism and community. Thus, autobiographical writing and the analysis of it have become highly visible artifacts of and for cultural activism, political action, and scholarly endeavor. Globalization, translation, migrations, and localness as processes of worldly cultural circulation and as nodes of, or metaphors for, theoretical inquiry have focused attention on how individuals—and sometimes collective subjects—write “themselves” into histories of past and present. From memoirs that highlight and embed “Muslim woman-ness” to manifestoes that track sexed embodiment as blueprints for activism; and from the popularity of celebrity autobiographies in the transnational book market to performance art that foregrounds the elusive and ever-shifting contours and boundaries of embodied selves, autobiography has constituted a range of practices that fascinates as it confronts the reader, listener, or viewer with her own networks and aporias of identification. Whether the consumer is positioned as fan or as scholar (or perhaps most productively, as both), autobiography’s allure is nicely captured by the sociologist Mary Evans’s rubric for it: “missing persons.”¹ Autobiography is a search for a moving target, a movement among narrator, author, and reader within the semiotic webs through which all performances—and therefore formations—of self-hood take place. When art tries to capture lived moments through writing the self, and when self-understanding is engendered, complicated, and undermined by the acts of writing and reading about it, the reflexivity of autobiography creates connections and identifications. But autobiography also confronts the reader with the responsibility to listen differently: to respect otherness in its many varieties, to query identification constantly even as one also works toward it, to recognize that reading across human socialities in history and their particularities of self-making requires profound deference and humility.

In this special issue, we explore questions of genre and “truth-effect,” asking in what ways can autobiography account for a lived life (or not) and still be considered as autobiography, and as history? What are its markers and boundaries? Is it infinitely expansive? How does autobiographical writing both incorporate and distance conventional and received models of selfhood in a given historical context, through models imagined, and genres constructed, in narration? How might “the self” look different not only across distinctions of gender identity and over time but also when we read from other places—and depending on where we stand as we listen? Ranging from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, from India to Iran (and its North American diaspora), Egypt, Ottoman Turkey, and Algeria, and then east again to Pakistan and Egypt in our three Roundtable essays, our contributions elicit...