Remembering Contentious Lives

This collection addresses two interrelated questions: How are the lived experiences of contention remembered in the form of auto/biography? How is life writing, as an act of cultural remembrance, used in activism? Building on cutting-edge scholarship on the socio-political potential of narrating lived experience, this volume takes life-writing as a new point of observation on the entanglement between memory and activism.

This is an open access book.

Chapter 1: Introduction.- Part One: Activist Life Writing.- Chapter 2: The Memoir-Activism Circuit: The Afterlives of Guantánamo Diary in Cultural Memory.- Chapter 3‘Can The Monster Speak? Ventriloquism and Voice in Trans Activist Life Writing.- Chapter 4: ‘Missing Mum’: Reframing Imprisoned Childhoods in Autobiography and Activism in the Iranian Context.- Part Two: Working Activist Lives.- Chapter 5: Life Writing as Solidarity Work in the 1970s Turkish Left.- Chapter 6: Writing Louise Michel: The Formation and Development of a Mythologised Revolutionary’.- Chapter 7: Nicaragua in the Rearview Mirror: Life Writing by Leftist US Activists since the 1980s.- Epilogue.- Chapter 8: The Syrian Prison: From Autobiography to the Creation of Identity.

Duygu Erbil is affiliate researcher at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICON), Utrecht University. She completed her doctoral degree in Comparative Literature at Utrecht University in 2024. Her PhD project analysed the cultural afterlife of Deniz Gezmis and was part of the project Remembering Activism: The Cultural Memory of Protest in Europe (ReAct).

Ann Rigney is professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University and PI of the Remembering Activism: The Cultural Memory of Protest in Europe (ReAct). She has published widely in the field of cultural memory studies, including most recently The Visual Memory of Protest (edited with Th. Smits, Amsterdam UP, 2023) and Remembering Hope (forthcoming).

Clara Vlessing is a lecturer at Utrecht University and a postdoctoral researcher at Radboud University, Nijmegen. She completed her doctoral degree at Utrecht University in 2023. Her PhD analysed the cultural afterlives of three women revolutionaries and was part of the project Remembering Activism: The Cultural Memory of Protest in Europe (ReAct).