Defence, Doubt, and Gracelessness (1904–9)

In this chapter, sources from Tillich’s student days (1904–9) are compared with Tillich’s later autobiographical narratives. Tillich’s father Johannes defended the conservative stance in church-political debates in Wilhelmine Prussia concerning the doctrinal orthodoxy of its pastors. Student Tillich’s determination to defend confessional standards at the national Wingolf conference 1906 shows his commitment to the same cause. Yet privately, Tillich was struggling with doubt about historical revelation, brought on by historical criticism, but chiefly his philosophical studies. Despite Tillich’s later insistence that Martin Kähler (1835–1912) taught him the centrality of justification, there was no grace in Tillich’s uncompromising stance as Wingolf leader, of which Kähler may have been quite critical. Furthermore, Tillich’s Monismusschrift (1908), influenced by his study of Fichte and others under Fritz Medicus (1876–1956), offers criticism of Kähler’s anti-metaphysical stance. Justification is merely a subordinated locus of his attempt to express Christianity in terms of idealist philosophy.

Narrating the Meaning of Existence: An Analysis of the Autobiographical Narratives of Three Translingual Writers

This paper focuses on the autobiographical narratives of three translingual writers, Nabokov, Brodsky and Makine. Their narratives are analyzed by taking into account Vygotsky’s ideas on the relationship between language and thought (1987), Bruner’s ideas on storytelling (1986, 2002) and Swain’s concept of languaging as a meaning-making process through language (Swain, 2006). The paper investigates the question of the role of language in making sense of writers’ lives as displaced people. In order to answer this question, we analyzed the autobiographical narratives for languaging episodes that are defined as autobiographical excerpts where the writers attempt to make sense of their lives as displaced people. The following major themes have been identified as the result of the analysis: construction of the lost world out of new experiences, discovery of the meaning of existence, reconciliation through cultural and linguistic hybridity. We believe that the implication of the study is that it can resonate with the lives of other displaced people at the time of cultural and linguistic superdiversity.

Anglocentrism in the Academy: On Linguistic Privilege, Mastery and Hoito

In this paper, we discuss the tacit agreement to use English as lingua franca in global academia. Our interest is in how Anglocentrism manifests within academic practices – seminars, conferences, and academic publishing – all of which are marked by neoliberal assumptions of mastery, quality, and efficacy. Drawing on autobiographical narratives, social media conversations, and literature, as well as recent discussions on conferencing and peer review practices, we analyse how historically shaped linguistic privilege and linguistic divides continue to be lived at the level of the body, affects and affective atmospheres. Language is not just language, rather, seemingly practical decisions about language always involve the aspects of material labour, time, money, and careers: they shape researcher subjectivities and entire domains of scientific knowledge. However, we also highlight the potentials nested in the emergence of minor language and the deterritorialising forces of humor. Articulating the speculative lines of what if, we propose more care-full academic linguistic practices.

Problematising Testimony in Autobiographical Narratives by Dalit Women in the English Translation

Dalit autobiographical narratives are widely and habitually being categorised by critics as testimonios or sociobiographies, with an implication to be understood as representative life-stories. Because of the genre’s perceived emphasis on ‘authenticity’, ‘representation of collective suffering’, and immanent connotations of being a political genre of speech for the marginalised, scholars/critics of Dalit literature have been applying the term testimonio to describe autobiographical narratives, which has inadvertently led to a normativisation of the available modi of ‘truth production’ about Dalit lived experiences. The objective of this paper is to dispute the adulatory assessment of testimonio as a genre, by highlighting the instances where the relationship between the self and the community in autobiographical narratives by Dalit women appears uneasy, fraught with dissensus and problematic, when examined from a Dalit feminist standpoint. By looking into ways of reading agency in Karukku (2000), Sangati (2005), and Viramma, Life of an Untouchable (1997), beyond the true-false, victim-oppressor and Dalit-Savarna simplistic binaries, this paper enunciates the problematic implications of using the nomenclature testimonio for reading these autobiographical narratives translated in English. Further, it posits arguments for shifting the emphasis on the politics of language and narrative to avert the trappings of the genre.

Black Travel Writing

What does it mean for Black diasporic writers to travel to Africa? Focusing on the period between the 1990s and 2010s, Isabel Kalous examines autobiographical narratives of travel to Africa by African American and Black British authors. She places the texts within the long tradition of Black diasporic engagement with the continent, scrutinizes the significance of Black mobility, and demonstrates that travel writing serves as a means to negotiate questions of identity, belonging, history, and cultural memory. To provide a framework for the analyses of contemporary narratives, her study outlines the emergence, development, and key characteristics of the multifaceted genre of Black travel writing. Authors discussed include, among others, Saidiya Hartman, Barack Obama, and Caryl Phillips.

An Udmurt Exceptional Performer, Dzhakapay

This article concentrates on the phenomenon of the individual in the ethnic culture of the Udmurt, bearing in mind that this has never been attempted before. This is a proper framework to analyse Ol’ga Solov’yova’s (1932–2018) personality, who was famous among the people as Dzhaky / Dzhakapay / Dzhaky apay (lit: Aunt Jay). A whole range of reasons justifies scientific interest in her: her huge repertoire of songs and rituals, her ability to improvise freely within her local tradition, her unique musical and auditory skills. The analysis of Dzhakapay’s character allows us to connect the songs of her repertoire and her fate. Many non-ritual songs are in fact autobiographical narratives, dedicated to reflexions on an unhappy fate, on being an orphan. A considerable number of songs in her repertoire belong to the category of so-called personal songs (in Russian: imennyye pesni, ‘name songs’), which represent a kind of personal memoire in musical form. Another unique feature of this performer’s art is her knowledge of songs from neighbouring villages in their original language (Russian, Mari, Tatar) and their translation into Udmurt. Her knowledge of the local traditional rituals made her very important to the local community, in which she was deeply respected. Until the last day of her life, she followed the ontological positions, the rules of behaviour, the canons of ritual and singing performance elaborated by tradition, and attempted to instil them into the people surrounding her. This awakened her genuine interest in the social and scientific milieu. And today, when she is no longer among us, her name is attached to many very different projects.