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  • New Forms of Self-Narration: Young Women, Life Writing and Human Rights by Ana Belén Martínez García
  • Meg Jensen (bio)
New Forms of Self-Narration: Young Women, Life Writing and Human Rights Ana Belén Martínez García Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, x + 151 pp. ISBN 9783030464196, $59.99 hardcover. Palgrave Studies in Life Writing.

Ana Belén Martínez García's interesting new book aims to "explore the conjunction between human rights fights" in the contemporary Global South, considering six young women advocates who have used a range of "self-narrating paths" and platforms to "excite distinctive" narrative empathy towards their otherwise "transgressive" activism (6). Drawing on key works of lifewriting theory from the past two decades, the book relies on Suzanne Keen's narratological work on "strategic narrative empathy" as a "useful tool" for interrogating and comparing "the narrative construction of human rights life-writing projects" (11). By engaging in various acts of self-representation, Martínez García argues, these young women activists have come to "represent a collective of endangered others," with all the complexities and contradictions such a role suggests. In this reading, their narratives of both fragile girlhood and daring feminist activism bear evidence of the public and private negotiations between the "individual and collective" identities they construct (8).

Martínez García considers works by Malala Yousafzai, the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize winner and education activist from Pakistan; Hyeonseo Lee and Yeonmi Park, two North Korean escapees who later became human rights advocates; Bana Alabed and Nujeen Mustafa, Syrian refugees who rose to prominence as spokespeople during the Syrian Civil War; and Nadia Murad, the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize recipient, who was a Yazidi captive of ISIS in Iraq, and is now an activist against human tracking. As Martínez García argues, each of these young women rose from "a position of victimhood," often with no small amount of traumatic experience, to "reclaim their identity," and to thus "rewrite who they are" (2–3). In addition to [End Page 408] their gender and relative youth, that each of these activists used English to disseminate these self-narratives of rights advocacy has, in Martínez García's words, "brought them together as icons in the public sphere" (2). New Forms of Self-Narration is "the first ever attempt" to explore "side by side" the wide variety of lifewriting texts produced by each activist, both online and offline, to analyze their narrative strategies, and finally to understand those narratives as "belonging to a unique, single, though multifaceted, project" (3).

While the material considered is indeed multifaceted, the book itself is firmly grounded within a framework of life narrative and human rights studies as outlined in the introduction, which draws on Kay Schaeffer and Sidonie Smith's foundational text Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition (2004). Martínez García then examines the activists' texts through interpretive lenses and theoretical approaches informed by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson's decades of scholarship in the field of life narrative studies more broadly. Other thematic and critical underpinnings include Dominick LaCapra's Writing History, Writing Trauma (2001); Judith Butler's work on the complex relations between precarity, "framing," and "grievabilty"; Gillian Whitlock's work on the interplay between life writing, testimony, and the postcolonial; and perhaps more pointedly, Leigh Gilmore's work on trauma, testimony, and narrative representations of the lives of often-victimized women and girls. Other key sources include Kate Douglas's multiple explorations of autobiography, trauma, memory, and childhood; Anna Poletti's work on the role of mediation in such representations and her collaborative research with Julie Rak on constructing the online self; as well as Laurie McNeill and John David Zuern's important work on the interpretation of "online lives." In fact, the breadth of secondary source material that Martínez García draws upon here often gets in the way of the clarity of her arguments: multiple but very brief citations fill page after page, leaving the reader scrambling for each chapter's considerable works cited to keep up. The relatively high number of self-citations in a work of this length...

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