Remembering Contentious Lives

Acknowledgements
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction
	Mediated Memory: Between Individual and Collective
	Life Writing Studies
	Life Writing, Memory, Political Contention
	Chapter Overview
	References
Part I: Narrative Activism
Chapter 2: The Memoir-Activism Circuit: The Afterlives of Guantánamo Diary in Cultural Memory
	Remembering Guantánamo in the Post-9/11 Era
	Becoming “A Terrorist Suspect”
	Pre-publication Memoir Advocacy
	Memoir Advocacy: The Literary as an Alternative Jurisdiction
	Memoir Activism: Animating and Activating Memoir
		Animating Memoir
		Activating Memoir
	Memoir and Cultural Memory: Mediation and Transmission
	Conclusion
	References
Chapter 3: Can the Monster Speak? Ventriloquism and Voice in Trans Activist Life Writing
	Introduction
	Learning to Speak Trans: The Institutional History of Trans Autobiography
	An Invitation to Speak
	Formal Limits: Who Is Speaking, and to Whom?
	The Open Question: Trans Activism as Scene, Rather than Event
	References
Chapter 4: Missing Mum: Reframing Imprisoned Childhoods in Autobiography and Activism in the Iranian Context
	Introduction: From Missing Mum to Transnational Activism
	Contextualising Missing Mum: “Mum Is a Political Prisoner”
	Cyborg Relationality: Meeting One’s Past in Encounter with the Other’s Present
	Formation of the Child Subject: Missing Mum in a Hundred Pages
	Conclusion: Orienting the Usable Past into the Future
	References
Part II: Writing Activist Lives
Chapter 5: Life Writing as Solidarity Work in the 1970s Turkish Left
	Introduction
	Reading the Autobiographical ‘I’ in Commemorative Writing
	Configurations of Solidarity and Memory
	The Self-Reflective Remembrance of the ‘Three Saplings’
	Behram’s Embodiment of Solidarity
	Conclusion
	References
Chapter 6: Writing Louise Michel: The Formation and Development of a Mythologised Revolutionary
	Introduction
	Michel’s Mythologisation
	Michel’s Life and Myth
	Witch or Angel: Louise Michel’s Symbolic Availability
	Humble Barbarian: Louise Michel’s Memoirs
	Insider/Outsider: Louise Michel’s Afterlives
	Conclusion
	References
Chapter 7: Nicaragua in the Rearview Mirror: Life Writing by Leftist US Activists Since the 1980s
	Remembering 1980s Leftist Nicaragua Activism
		The US Nicaragua Peace and Solidarity Movement
		Life Writing in the PSM: Usable Pasts and Present Aspirations
	Tracing Left-Wing Melancholia: The Hybridity of Post-1980s Memory-Making of the PSM
		“We Have Only Started”:6 Archiving Hope and Mobilising for the Future
		“Why Not Make It into a Book?”:11 Personal and Collective Memory-Making
		“I Am Certain You Are There”:16 Evoking the Old Activist Self
		“They Called Us Sandalistas”:17 Challenging the Cultural Memory of the PSM
		“Why Can’t We Think for Ourselves?”:20 Challenging Continuities
		“[T]he Sandinistas Made Me Feel Lucky”:29 Campism and Continuities
	The Future of the Cultural Memory of the PSM
	References
Part III: Epilogue
Chapter 8: The Syrian Prison: From Autobiography to the Creation of Identity
	Introduction
	Prison Autobiography
	Prisoner Autobiography
	The Prison’s Autobiography After the Revolution
	Assembling the Prison’s Autobiography
	Writing the Prison’s Autobiography
	Shaping Syrian Identity
	Prison Autobiography as Resistance
	References
Index