American Lives

alfred hornung Editor hornung (Ed.) · American Lives his volume focuses on religious, historical, literary, American Tcultural and political models, developed in Ameri- ca, for the realization and representation of Ameri- can lives. These original articles demonstrate the importance of different forms of life writing for the hornung Lives disciplines of American Studies. Experts in the field (Ed.) such as literary and cultural critics Sidonie Smith, Craig Howes, Birgit Däwes, historian Thomas Bender, and writer critic Siri Hustvedt among others American Studies ★ A Monograph Series cover the wide range of the presentation and perform- Volume 234 Druckfarben ance of selves in colonial literature, nature writing, American cyan immigrant and campaign auto/biographies, religion, magenta film, TV series, rap music, graphic presentations, Lives gelb comics, and sports. Addressing the transnational schwarz self-affirmations of American citizens in Hawai’i, the Caribbean islands, on reservations, and in urban ghettos they represent the diversified panorama of American lives.

Universitätsverlag winter isbn 978-3-8253-6179-2 Heidelberg american studies – a monograph series Volume 234

Edited on behalf of the German Association for American Studies by reinhard r. doerries gerhard hoffmann alfred hornung

American Lives

Edited by alfred hornung

Universitätsverlag winter Heidelberg Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar.

cover illustration Keynote speakers of the DGfA 2012 in Mainz: From left to right: Birgit Däwes, Thomas Bender, Craig Howes, Siri Hustvedt, Sidonie Smith Cover idea: Tanja Heising

isbn 978-3-8253-6179-2

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Table of Contents

ALFRED HORNUNG American Lives: Preface ...... ix

Keynote Lectures

SIDONIE SMITH “America’s Exhibit A”: Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Living History and the Genres of Authenticity ...... 3

THOMAS BENDER Intellectual Biography and the Matrix of Creativity ...... 27

CRAIG HOWES Slow Lives: Micro-Traditions in American and Hawaiian Biography and Autobiography ...... 49

BIRGIT DÄWES “What happens when the vanishing race doesn’t vanish?” Scenes of Native North American Historio/Biography ...... 77

SIRI HUSTVEDT Borderlands: First, Second, and Third Person Adventures in Crossing Disciplines ...... 111

History and American Lives

PATRICK ERBEN “Ship-Mate-Ship”: Commemorating the Lives of Friends in Francis Daniel Pastorius’s Anniversary Poems ...... 139 vi

CARSTEN JUNKER Narrating Family Lives: Religion and Enslavement in Samuel West’s Memoirs (1807) ...... 157

KIRSTEN TWELBECK Reconstructing Race Relations: Esther Hill Hawks’ Diary and her Life Among the Freedmen ...... 173

HANNAH SPAHN Eliza Potter’s “barberous profession”: Self, Race, and Nation in A Hairdresser’s Experience in High Life ...... 189

KATHLEEN LOOCK Laughing at the Greenhorn: Humor in Immigrant Autobiographies ... 207

Politics and American Lives

MARKUS F. FALTERMEIER Self, Other, and Catholicism in Dorothy Day’s The Long Loneliness (1952): Narrative Constructions of a Personalist Identity ...... 227

KATHY-ANN TAN “Creating Dangerously”: Writing, Exile and Diaspora in Edwidge Danticat’s and Dany Laferrière’s Haitian Memoirs ...... 249

CEDRIC ESSI Transnational Affiliations in the Mixed Race Memoir: Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father ...... 261

CHRISTINA GERKEN The DREAMers: Narratives of Deservingness in Pro-Immigrant Activism in the Twenty-First Century...... 283

JOCHEN ECKE Grant Morrison’s ‘Fiction Suits’: Comics Autobiography as Genre Fiction/Genre Fiction as Comics Autobiography ...... 297

vii

LUKAS ETTER On the Drawing Board: The Many Autobiographical “Wedges” of Alison Bechdel ...... 313

EVA BOESENBERG Family Business: Death in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home ...... 327

Media and American Lives

NASSIM WINNIE BALESTRINI Photography as Online Life Writing: Miranda July’s and Harrell Fletcher’s Learning to Love You More (2002-09) ...... 341

BIRGIT M. BAURIDL “Deep-Mapping” the Diversity of New York Lives: The “City of Memory” Digital Project ...... 355

KATJA KANZLER Adaptation and Self-Expression in Julie/Julia ...... 369

DUSTIN BREITENWISCHER Life and Times of . . . Promethean (Counter-)Narratives and the Poetic Function of Aesthetic Experience in Rap ...... 381

CHRISTOPH RIBBAT Staring at (the Man Formerly Known as) Lew Alcindor: The Cultural Politics of a Basketball Life ...... 401

FRANK MEHRING Remediating Multi-Racial Memories: Audre Lorde’s Berlin Years and the Genealogy of Afro-German Life Writing ...... 415

JULIA FAISST Rebuilding the Neighborhood: Race, Property, and Urban Renewal Projects in Tremé ...... 443 viii

Life Writing and Life Science

BIRGIT CAPELLE A Transcultural Consideration of “Place”: Thoreau’s Walden Pond and Kitarō Nishida’s “basho” ...... 467

DIRK VANDERBEKE The Mental Detective: Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn ...... 479

HENRIKE LEHNGUTH The Killer Inside: First-Person Narration and the Reader/Viewer in Serial Killer Narratives ...... 491

MARTIN HOLTZ The Pathological Protagonist in Recent Films by Martin Scorsese ..... 507

JAN D. KUCHARZEWSKI Survival of the Sickest? Cognitive Disorders and the Question of Agency in Contemporary American Fiction ...... 521

MITA BANERJEE, RALF DAHM, BIRGIT DÄWES, CRAIG HOWES, SIRI HUSTVEDT, NORBERT W. PAUL, and SIDONIE SMITH with JULIA WATSON Panel on Life Sciences and Life Writing ...... 537

Contributors ...... 561

ALFRED HORNUNG

American Lives: Preface

The history of the American continent from the migration of Asian peoples via the transplantation of European settlers to modern-day immigration of newcomers from all parts of the world up to the twenty- first century has been accompanied by multiform patterns created for the representation of American lives. These forms of representation range from the cave paintings and rock art of indigenous people or their traditions of storytelling via the written narratives of explorers and settlers about their encounter with the New World to the transcultural accounts of immigrants in search for a new American life. Part of the colonial legacy of the European conquest and discovery of America is the adher- ence to conventional forms used for the representation of human lives and the emergence of the human subject in the Renaissance period. First ignorant of, and later disregarding the material culture of life narratives by indigenous people, European immigrants privileged the classical forms of autobiography and biography to accompany the succession of generations. Taking Saint Augustine for a model, Puritans alternated between both forms but also instituted the tradition of the conversion narrative and learned the practice of the captivity narrative as the mediation between European and Native lives. The prime example is the Founding Father Benjamin Franklin, who carries on the Puritan adaptation of the Augustinian form of life writing and establishes in his Autobiography the model for the representation of the self within the new republic of the United States of America. This model has served as a guideline for readers and practitioners of life writing in America. It is only in the second half of the twentieth century when autobiography and biography study become recognized fields of academic research, that new forms of life writing are practiced and retrospectively discovered

x Alfred Hornung leading to the urgently needed expansion of the canon and methods of interpretation. For a long time, the classical forms of autobiography and biography as full-blown and complete accounts of human lives were considered the only versions of the genre worthy of discussion. The gradual expansion and inclusion of other forms began with James Olney’s landmark collec- tion Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical in 1980, continued with the turn to expressions of the self by women, ethnic minorities, and postcolonial migrants in the 1980s and 1990s, to yield the most comprehensive and extensive account of life writing research in Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s Reading Autobiography in 2010. As such it covers autobiography, biography, journals, diaries, e-lives, Internet blogs, performances of self, film and video clips, photography, comic visualizations, musical orchestrations etc. Especially the use of the new media for the representations of the self has made life writing and the presentation of life stories one of the most popular genres of contemporary cultures in the United States of America. Susan Sontag’s suggestion of a correlation between photography and American democracy also seems to hold for an affinity between autobiography and American democracy (Sontag, Hornung 1990). In recent years, the conventional wisdom of life writing in the fields of literary studies has been challenged by dramatic changes in the study of human life and the natural habitat of organic species. The increasing interest in the social sciences and the media in life writing has led to a number of innovative interdisciplinary approaches. The most radical challenge, however, comes from the fields of life science and neurosci- ence. Along with new insights into the chemical constitution of the human subject as visible in the discovery of the genome project, critics like Cary Wolfe and Stefan Herbrechter have advanced the idea of a posthu- man subject beyond the familiar Enlightenment position of the self as a reason-based being to also include the animal sphere. A combination of literary analyses of life writing with physical examinations of the materiality of the human body have been advanced by the emerging subject area of the medical humanities (Charon). The common assump- tion of all these endeavors about the study of the self is story telling. Life writing and life science share and depart from stories about life told by human subjects on different occasions in a number of different forms.

American Lives: Preface xi

Again, the United States of America seems to be at the forefront of such new interdisciplinary approaches to the subject of life. For several years, American Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz in conjunction with the Center for Intercultural Studies has focused on the interdisciplinary study of life writing as documented in a number of international conference volumes, most recently on Auto/Biography and Mediation (Hornung 2010) or Ecology and Life Writing (Hornung / Zhao 2013). For the past two years Mainz Americanists Mita Banerjee, Alfred Hornung, and Oliver Scheiding have collaborated with colleagues in natural sciences and medical studies to establish a doctoral college on life writing and life science. Hence it seemed to be appropriate to propose this topic for the annual conven- tion of the German Association for American Studies organized by the American Studies division at Mainz in June 2012. The general topic of “American Lives” was intended to solicit presentations which extended to the full range of lives lived in North America as well as the panoply of forms used for the (re)presentation of these lives in past and present. Along with five prominent and internationally renowned keynote speakers a great variety of papers were given, which reflected the rich variety of the field and the many approaches. The present volume assembles the keynote lectures and a selection of twenty-four papers out of the seventy-two given at the conference, arranged in five sections. In the first section the keynote speakers set the agenda for a discussion of the wide range of possibilities and approaches to the representation of American lives. Sidonie Smith opens the series with a reinterpretation of Hillary Clinton’s erstwhile campaign autobiography Living History. In her reading she shows magisterially the ingenious way of orchestrating the different genres available for political autobiography which can also be recontextualized to serve the past Madame Secretary of State as a platform for a second run for the presidency in 2016. Thomas Bender’s contribution takes issue with the practice of biography and critiques the often perfunctory arrangement of factual details which tend to neglect creative elements in the representation of public intellectuals. With reference to recent biographies of Reinhold Niebuhr, Richard Hofstadter, and Christopher Lasch he exemplifies the deficient quality of “a biographer’s bookish craft” and opts for the combination of literary imagination with historical scholarship. Sidonie Smith’s and Thomas Bender’s reinterpretation of conventional forms of

xii Alfred Hornung autobiography and biography in the service of politics and history serve as a backdrop for unconventional and experimental representations of American lives on the margins of mainstream society. In analogy to slow food, Craig Howes proposes “slow lives” as a new approach to the study of nineteenth-century forms of auto/biography which emerged among indigenous people in Hawai‘i in response to colonial powers and Christian missionaries. These non-Western representations of lives, Craig Howes argues, differed decisively from the conventional autobiographical practices and appeared as sketches and pamphlets in magazines and newspapers.1 For Howes these slow lives constitute major forms of resistance and powerful means to defend Hawaiian sover- eignty. As such, they can be likened to the interaction between official national auto/biographies and the life writing practices virulent among community members on the continental United States. Birgit Däwes’s contribution focuses on the representation of Native North American lives and juxtaposes early biographical and photographical accounts by American ethnographers with performances of Native American selves on stage. The intercultural engagement of contemporary Native Ameri- can playwrights with key episodes of their past establishes what Däwes calls avant-garde versions of “indigenous historio/biography.” Siri Hustvedt approaches the topic of American lives from the perspective of a successful writer of fiction, autobiographical narratives, and criticism who is interested in both life writing and life science. The borderland between the different disciplines, between the soft-thinking humanities and the hard-core science becomes a question of different personal pronouns. While for her, the writer’s first person always includes the second, the third conventionally seems to be reserved for objective science. The articles in the second section connect with Craig Howes’s idea of “slow lives” and are concerned with the discussion of unusual Ameri- can lives in Colonial America and the history of the United States. Patrick Erben finds in Pastorius’s writing the metaphor of “ship-mate- ship” as a new form of bonding between English and German immigrants. In this sense his poems become written accounts of personal loss which is compensated by spiritual ties with other passengers. The

______1 Tim Lanzendörfer discovered similar biographical practices in American magazines in the Early Republic in his dissertation (Mainz 2012).

American Lives: Preface xiii transnational thrust of Pastorius’s poetic life writing, the mediation between different national origins and religious beliefs recurs in autobiographical accounts of interracial relations. Carsten Junker reads the unpublished 1807 memoirs of Reverend Samuel West in Massachu- setts, interspersed with his brother’s letters from the South about slavery, as an interesting interrelation of religious persuasion and enslavement couched in the interrelation of two generic modes of life writing. Kerstin Twelbeck and Hannah Spahn take up autobiographical representations of professional women in mid-nineteenth century in the interaction between African Americans and white society. While Twelbeck interprets the diary of Esther Hill Hawks, a female doctor who was allowed to practice her profession by treating members of the Gullah population on the Sea Islands, as an interracial and gender spe- cific document of the Civil War and Reconstruction period, Spahn alternatively focuses on the interracial experiences of an African Ameri- can hairdresser in Eliza Potter’s autobiography. Finally Kathleen Loock’s study of immigrant autobiographies at the turn of 1900 sees the conscious inclusion of humor as a way to break down the barrier between insider and outsider and to assimilate to American society. The third section with articles on the representation of American lives in politics connects with Sidonie Smith’s discussion of gender and genre in Hillary Clinton’s autobiography. Like Smith, Markus Faltermeier recognizes in Dorothy Day’s autobiography The Long Loneliness (1952) a mediation between the demands of the Catholic Church and a personalist position which follows the generic model of the Bildungsroman. Questions of national affiliation, exile, and home determine postcolonial representations of life, which Kathy-Ann Tan examines in the Haitian memoirs of Edwidge Danticat and Dany Laferrière. Cedric Essi’s reading of Dreams from My Father takes up Tavia Nyong’o’s claim of Barack Obama as America’s “first postcolonial president” and juxtaposes the mixed race report of the first part “Origins” with Obama’s identification with his Africanness in the third part “Kenya.” Christina Gerken analyzes narratives in favor of young and gifted undocumented aliens in conjunction with President Obama’s 2012 DREAM Act to defer their deportation as a neo-liberal agenda, which deflects from the larger issue of an overall appropriate immigration policy. The remaining three essays of this section focus on graphic representations of selves in comics and their generic possibilities of

xiv Alfred Hornung political negotiation. Disagreeing with critical opinions which establish autobiographix as a separate genre of mainstream autobiography, Jochen Ecke constructs an analogy between Grant Morrison’s presentation of superheroes in comics and the representation of selves in conventional forms of life writing. Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home serves Lukas Etter for a metacritical analysis of the construction of pan- els and Eva Boesenberg for a discussion of the absent presence of a queer family. The articles of the fourth section connect with the performance of Native Americans in Birgit Däwes’s lecture and display the many possibilities which old and new media provide for the (re)presentation of (ethnic) American lives. Photography enhanced by digital media and the social network 2.0 is the subject of Nassim Balestrini’s analysis of assignments for online family photographs curated by Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher. City of Memory is another digital project by curators and artists in New York, which collects data from citizens in different boroughs. Birgit Bauridl reads this combination of uploaded stories and video clips as part of the narrative panorama of city life. Katja Kanzler takes up the Julia/Julie Project in which Julie Powell relates her experience of cooking the recipes of Julia Child’s cookbook. What starts out as a popular blog turns into a film and a successful book. While comment- ing on the hybrid life writing genres of “blooks” and “flooks” Kanzler ends up tracing the astonishing trajectory from digital media back to the reevaluation of books. The appreciation of the autobiographical mode in the media is particularly visible and audible in self-expressions of ethnic minorities. While Dustin Breitenwischer discovers a new form of poeti- cal self-narrativization in the lyrics of popular rap artists Jay-Z and Eminem, whose performance of selves takes on Promethean dimensions, Christoph Ribbat, Frank Mehring and Julia Faisst look at different stages of African American self-representation with regard to the different media. Ribbat retraces the steps of the career of the promising high school athlete Lew Alcindor on the Ed Sullivan show in 1963 to his successful career as an NBA star who changes into the Muslim Abdul- Jabbar, becomes the author of the autobiography Giant Steps (1983) and an acclaimed historian of African American history. Mehring traces the awakening of Afro-German consciousness raised by Audre Lorde during her guest professorship at the John F. Kennedy Institute in Berlin, the publication of their autobiographical statements in Farbe bekennen, its

American Lives: Preface xv translation into English and its remediatization into a film. Faisst analyzes the HBO series Tremé as a representation of the lives of African Americans uprooted by hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. The articles of the last section follow up on Siri Hustvedt’s cross- disciplinary boundary position marked by different personal pronouns and engage in the interrelation of life writing and life science. Birgit Capelle interprets Henry David Thoreau’s borderland existence at Wal- den Pond as the basis of a transcultural linkage to the thought of the modern Japanese philosopher Kitarō Nishida (1870-1945). Their transcendental displacement of natural location and physical being for the sake of “absolute nothingness” could be seen as a movement from the concerns of daily living to mental operations. Recent examples of detective fiction and films thematize aberrations of the mind involving criminal acts and disease. Dirk Vanderbeke uses Jonathan Lethem’s detective fiction Motherless Brooklyn for a discussion of Asperger and Tourette syndromes, which determine the deviant behavior of criminals. Martin Holtz interprets auteur filmmaker Martin Scorcese’s pathological figures in Aviator and Shutter Island as a retreat from the burden of selves in everyday life and the search for salvation. Henrike Lehnguth looks at the representation of serial killers in contemporary films and fictions from the point of view of the reader and spectator. In her reading she gives special attention to the personal involvement of the reader in the action through a first-person narrative perspective. Jan D. Kucharzewski finally recognizes a neurological turn in contemporary American fiction. For him, these neuronovels share an organic determin- ism with naturalistic literature which he exemplifies with reference to Richard Powers’s Eco Maker. The volume concludes with an interdisciplinary panel moderated by Mita Banerjee in which the keynote speakers joined by MD Norbert W. Paul and developmental geneti- cist Ralf Dahm address the links and common bases of life writing and life science. The annual conference of the German Association for American Studies on “American Lives” and the publication of this volume are the composite work of many helping hands and creative minds. The officers of the GAAS, President Udo Hebel, Vice President Carmen Birkle and Executive Director Philipp Gassert, supported the efforts of the local organizational team in Mainz on all accounts. The concerted collabora- tion of all Mainz Americanists, Professors Mita Banerjee, Alfred

xvi Alfred Hornung

Hornung, and Oliver Scheiding in league with their competent teams made this interdisciplinary project of life writing possible. Silvia Appeltrath, Anette Vollrath, and Jens Temmen directed the teamwork of graduate assistants, most of them engaged in life writing research: Holger Beresheim, Valerie Bopp, Johannes Brauer, Pascale Cicolelli, Lukas Dausend, Yvonne Gutenberger, Denijal Jegic, Katja Kurz, Joana Lück, Christine Marks, Emily Modick, Nuquangdala Namingha, Christine Plicht, Charlene Plutte, Benedikt Rosmanith, Rebecca Schäfer, Damien Schlarb, Anita Wohlmann. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of a number of institutions for the invitation of the plenary speakers: the German Re- search Foundation, the Embassy of the United States, the Center for Intercultural Studies of the Johannes Gutenberg University, the Research Center of Social and Cultural Studies Mainz (SOCUM), the Friends of the University, the Chamber of Commerce of Rheinhessen, and the publisher of this American Studies Monograph series, Universitätsverlag Winter in Heidelberg. The publication of this volume within a year after the venue of the conference required another concerted efforts of contributors, editors, copy editors, and the publishing house. I would like to thank all of them for their timely cooperation. Specials thanks go to Emily Modick, who corresponded with contributors and coordinated the work of the editorial team. In the laborious task of proofreading and formatting the manuscripts she was supported expertly by Valerie Bopp and Nicholas Glickman. The Mainz American Studies division hopes that the conference and volume on “American Lives” document the rich potential of life writing research and will generate more interdisciplinary cooperation with medical humanities and life science.

Works Cited

Charon, Rita. Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness. New York: Oxford UP, 2006. Herbrechter, Stefan. . Darmstadt: Wissenschafliche Buchgesellschaft, 2009. Hornung, Alfred, ed. Autobiography and Democracy in America. Thematic Issue of Amerikastudien / American Studies 35.3 (Fall 1990). Hornung, Alfred, ed. Auto/Biography and Mediation. Heidelberg: Winter, 2010.

American Lives: Preface xvii

Hornung, Alfred, and Zhao Baisheng, eds. Ecology and Life Writing. Heidelberg: Winter, 2013. Lanzendörfer, Tim. The Professionalization of the American Magazine: Periodicals, Biography, and Nationalism in the Early Republic. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2013. Olney, James, ed. Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 22010. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977. Wolfe, Cary. What is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010.

xviii Alfred Hornung

Keynote Lectures

4 Birgit Däwes

SIDONIE SMITH

“America’s Exhibit A”: Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Living History and the Genres of Authenticity*

“Does she have the stuff to come on Hardball . . . into the belly of the beast?” (Chris Matthews to Howard Fineman, MSNBC 2000)

In this terrain, women are held up simultaneously to often deeply contradictory standards-could Clinton, a girl, really be commander in chief? Or was she too tough and unladylike for the job? (Susan Douglas, Enlightened Sexism)

As the old canard goes: a year is a millennium in politics. So what the candidate line-up will look like in 2016 is far from predictable. But for many politicos, the expectation is that Hillary Clinton will make a second run for the Democratic nomination and then for the White House. She will be 69 in 2016, not the oldest candidate; Ronald Reagan was 69 when elected. She’ll have her experience as Secretary of State in the Obama administration, international bona fides, and security credibility that expand her claims to formidable expertise. Chances are she will have written another book, this one on foreign policy. Clinton’s 2003 bestselling autobiography Living History will more than likely be reis- sued sometime before the campaign begins in earnest. It will most likely enter the New York Times best-seller list for a second time. Given this possible future for Clinton’s autobiography, I want to return to Living History to meditate on the political uses of autobiography ______* Article reprinted from American Literary History 24.3 (2012): 523-42.

4 Sidonie Smith in the gendered arena of American presidential politics.1 Living History earned big bucks. Its audio book version won an Emmy. The book tour, interviews, and reviews that followed put Clinton in contact with a national audience of celebrity fans and potential voters that the aspiring presidential candidate would recruit into “Hillaryland.”2 Translations of the book, including the Chinese version, turned her autobiography into a global best-seller.3 As prologue to a campaign for the presidential nomination, Living History sought to do the social work of convincing the voting public that a woman could assume national leadership. Not that Hillary Clinton was the first woman to launch a presidential bid in the US. Margaret Chase Smith, a Congresswoman and senator from Maine, made a bid for the Republican nomination in 1964, losing out to Barry Goldwater; and Shirley Chisholm, Congresswoman from the 12th District of New York, made a bid for the Democratic nomination, the first by an African American, in 1972. But Clinton was the first former First Lady to position herself for a presidential run, and the first woman with national and global celebrity status to establish a viable plan for pursuing and gaining the nomination. The “Hillary” of Living History, then, would translate celebrity aura into active support, skepticism into investment, and do so by performing a convincing political persona. But how would this woman, this feminist professional, former First Lady, and duly-elected senator, craft the story of representative American-ness in the hyper- masculinized genre of the aspiring candidate’s autobiography; and how would she perform the intimacy that secures the claim to authenticity in this highly mediated form? ______1 I am indebted to Ben Belado, Beth Davila, and Hannah Dickinson for survey- ing and summarizing recent work on presidential politics and for tracking reviews and commentaries on Clinton’s Living History. 2 The term “Hillaryland” became the nickname for the section of the 1992 presidential campaign headquarters in Little Rock, where Hillary Clinton’ s staff organized her activities. “The name stuck,” she writes in Living History (115). 3 The Chinese translation caused uproar around the Chinese government’s act of censorship. The section in which Clinton describes her participation in and speech before the women delegates of the 1995 United Nations Beijing Conference on Women had been deleted.

“America’s Exhibit A”: Hillary Clinton’s Living History 5

1. Mobilizing the “Authentic” Political Persona

Before pursuing these questions, let me comment briefly on the social action of contemporary candidate autobiography. A corporate production, the candidacy of late capitalism is crafted, packaged, mar- keted, displayed, polled, and sold. The presidential candidate must perform as a celebrity, sustain celebrity appeal, and successfully navigate the shoals of celebrity culture.4 In this densely mediated environment, the political persona is ever more deftly and promiscuously imaged, voiced, choreographed, and networked.5 Central to the political utility of the persona is the “life story,” the story that does the political work of securing the symbolic relationship between person and political system (Corner 398), at once individualizing the candidate and projecting the candidate as the embodiment of representivity, to use Dana Nelson’s term (“Representative/Democracy” 325). The aspiring candidate wants to get a book written, get it out, get it read, and get it on the New York Times best-seller list. Its very shelf life registers its power to compel voter support. In the first decades of the twenty-first century, memoir culture, celebrity culture, and presidential politics converge to convert a life into money, message, and conduit for affective attachment that circulates through what Lauren Berlant defines as the intimate public sphere (1-24). Contemporary candidate autobiography would seem to be highly managed and instrumental, and thus inauthentic. But in politics,

______4 “Celebrity politics,” argue Darrell M. West and John Orman, “fit the needs of a new media that focused on human features, not detailed substance” (10). See their Celebrity Politics (2003). This is not to argue that celebrity is new to presidential politics. In over 200 years of American presidential politics. Candidates for the presidency have often been celebrities of a kind, men who earned recognition for various achievements or exploits, men like Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower. 5 Tracking changes in the presentation of political personas in a succession of mediascapes, John R. Corner describes the contemporary moment of political performance as one characterized by the “degree of self-conscious strategy attending its planning and performance, the intensity of its interaction with media systems and the degree to which certain personal qualities” are “seen not merely to enhance but to underwrite political values” (387).

6 Sidonie Smith convincing authenticity is the coin of the realm. And so, how exactly is an aura of authenticity produced in the utilitarian, commodified form of political autobiography? Autobiographical discourse itself promises a kind of authenticity. The “narrating ‘I’” functions as the “voice” of the politician seeking to capture the attention of the reader sitting at home, in a coffee house, on the beach (Smith and Watson 79).6 In its address to the imagined interlocutor, the narrating “I” promises to draw the reader into the zone of familiarity, identification, and affective attachment, thereby overcoming, if only for a moment and illusorily, the sense of remoteness between voter and candidate. But there are other metrics of authenticity at the intersection of the singular history and shared discourses. Generic intelligibility, by which I mean a species or template of storytelling that is recognizable to an audience, is certainly one of the most important in producing the aura of authenticity. Modes of autobiographical narration reproduce intelligible subject positions, plots, tropes, and rhetorics of self-representation. Do- ing so, they project a “reality” effect of the sincere or “real” person be- hind the political persona. “We elect our leaders,” observes Laura Kipnis, “because they’ve made themselves legible to us as a collective mirror,” in this way they “embody the appropriate collective story” (317). Kipnis’s observation zeroes in on the importance of the generic mode to the aura of authenticity attached to a candidate’s story. And it is to the authenticity effects of generic intelligibility in Clin- ton’s Living History that I now turn. What is fundamentally at stake in this book that would launch a thousand voters is how to find the right

______6 In “Teaching Voice of Authors, Narrators and Audience,” James Phelan, pointing to the “synesthesia of narrative voice,” suggests that “as we see words on a page we can hear sounds” (2). See Teaching Narrative Theory (2010), eds. James Phelan, Brian McHale, and David Herman. Julia Watson and I note in the revised edition of Reading Autobiography (2010) that “voice as an attribute of the narrating ‘I’ . . . is a metaphor for the reader’s felt experience of the narrator’s personhood, and a marker of the relationship between a narrating ‘I’ and his or her experiential history . . . . Although the text unfolds through an ensemble of voices, we as readers ascribe a distinct voice to that ensemble, with a way of organizing experience, a rhetoric of address, a particular register of affect, and an ideological inflection that is attached to the subject’s history” (79-80).

“America’s Exhibit A”: Hillary Clinton’s Living History 7 story (the right stuff) for the narrating “I” to tell. The “I” of Living His- tory has to mobilize autobiographical narration to do the social work of launching a presidential bid by a feminist woman by offering the public access to the real “Hillary” whose claims to political power are legitimate. This challenge involves negotiating a masculine subject position, projecting for “the people” what Nelson describes as critical to producing the aura of constitutional “presidentialism”—a “concentrated and purified experience of representation in the executive body of the president the concrete correlative for national manhood” (333). 7 Equally challenging, the narrating “I” brings to this autobiographical project multiple histories: she is at once a feminist and a former First Lady, in themselves potentially contradictory subject positions, and certainly historically nonpresidential subject positions. In this context, it is important to recall that Hillary Clinton’s autobiography is a corporate project. The narrating “I” of Living History is the collective endeavor of Clinton herself, her three ghostwriters, and the editor(s) involved in its publication. While the fact that it is ghostwritten certainly does not surprise—ghostwriting of political memoirs is the norm as in Theodore Sorenson’s ghostwriting of John F. Ken- nedy’s Profiles in Courage (1955) and more recently Mark Salter’s co- authorship of John McCain’s Faith of My Fathers: A Family Memoir (1999)—the corporate ghostwriting in Living History exposes the postmodern bureaucratization of a candidacy, its standardization, packaging, and test marketing. This ensemble of actors producing Living History as the aspiring presidential candidate’s official autobiography actually mobilizes a constellation of generic modes and autobiographical discourses, all of which produce their different authenticity effects. In following the di- ______7 In “Representative/Democracy,” Nelson explores the implications of the Constitution’s production of the presidential system of government, one that locates “representivity’s logic and desires” (326) in the figure and body of the president as synecdoche for the nation. “This presidential institutionalization of representative democracy,” she argues, “offered a reassuringly hierarchicalized substitute for the messiness of local interaction: a rationally stratified structure, the atomization of factional interests through electoral distance, und (eventually) the ritual release of democratic energy in the form of elections” (333).

8 Sidonie Smith verse strands and entanglements of the different generic modes, we begin to understand how the published autobiography produces, or not, the authenticity effect of a real Hillary, the convincing persona that is always at stake in the political field. The case of Hillary Clinton’s Living History and its “management” of “being American” (Berlant 25) captures what’s at stake in the political arena for the feminist who would be president. Clinton’s very public narrative is routed through something like live generic modes—modernist bildungsroman, feminist bildungsroman, First Lady memoir, buddy narrative, and war memoir; and it refuses to be routed through a sixth mode, the celebrity confession. In exploring the authenticity effects of these generic modes and tracking the intimations of inauthenticity inher- ent in their contradictory subject positions and rhetorics, we can assess how the heterogeneous, sometimes conflicting, genres of life-writing expose the difficulty of successful1y managing political and politicized gender. In what follows, we can observe how it takes a “village” of genres to make, and unmake, the “real” “Hillary.”

2. Modernist Bildungsroman

Living History seems a robustly modernist autobiography, characterized by its retrospective narrative trajectory, its developmental, autonomous narrated “I,” and its narrative grammar of modernity as a telos of free- dom and progress. In this it reproduces a highly intelligible mode of political memoir in which, Margaret Henderson notes, “individualistic narrators use linearity and realism to recount their lives, the seemingly authoritative mode with which to make the self cohere, produce verisimilitude, and construct the historical record” (169). This generic mode is the mode of the traditional bildungsroman whose history ex- tends back to the late eighteenth century. Indeed, Living History can be read as a coming-of-age story of education and a journey of subjective incorporation as a normative national subject. In The Queen of America Goes to Washington: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (1997), Lauren Berlant calls this the “infantile citizen form,” “a political subjectivity based on the suppression of critical knowledge and a resulting contrac- tion of citizenship to something smaller than agency: patriotic inclina- tion, default social membership, or the simple possession of a normal

“America’s Exhibit A”: Hillary Clinton’s Living History 9 national character” (27). The infantile citizen’s narrative, according to Berlant, “casts his [sic] pilgrimage to Washington as a life-structuring project that began in childhood” (37). The first paragraph of Living History announces the trope of the defining national fable: “I wasn’t born a first lady or a senator. I wasn’t born a Democrat. I wasn’t born a lawyer or an advocate for women’s rights and human rights, I wasn’t born a wife or mother. I was born an American in the middle of the twentieth century, a fortunate time and place” (1). Living History reproduces what Joseph Slaughter describes in another context as the tautological/teleological structure of bildungsroman; that is, it “situate[s] the human personality both before and after the process of incorporation” (26). The narrating “I” of the autobiography is the elected senator who tells the story of becoming what she was from the beginning, in Living History’s case the essential American subject. As such, the narrator acts as guarantor of the First Lady’s “enfranchisement” (à la Slaughter 20) as a bona fide and electable candidate. For the aspiring presidential candidate, then, the modernist bildungsroman form reproduces the realness norms naturalizing Ameri- can national identity. Through the performative act of life writing, the narrating “I” of Living History registers the characterological features of modernist subjectivity, among them free will, intelligence, mastery, entrepreneurial autonomy, and ambition. This reiteration of the national fable of individualist self-making secures the symbolic relationship between person and nation (Corner 398). As Philip Holden observes, the social project of modernist self-narrating involves projecting the legiti- macy of power by suturing the story of the individual to the story of the nation, projecting as it does so the coherence of both national subject and nation.8

______8 Over the last 50 years, as Philip Holden has observed, national leaders have produced a succession of such modernist narratives, especially national leaders of movements for decolonization who were identified or elected as “fathers” of the nation. Through a temporality of modernist, progressive linearity, an individualist fable of agentic heroism, and a realist aesthetics, these narratives join the story of “the growth of the individual” “with the growth of national consciousness and, frequently proleptically, the achievement of an independent nation-state” (5).

10 Sidonie Smith

Yet the modernist autobiography of the political leader has been a masculinist mode of bildungsroman, conjoining the phallic agent of narration, the linearity of progressive time, and the symbolic narrated “I.” The realness norms producing the authenticity effect of American identity for the aspiring presidential candidate are effects of the masculinist tropes of phallic leadership. The constraint of the modernist mode of bildungsroman is to position the woman who would be president in a constitutively masculine subject position, to position her, in effect, as an inauthentically gendered presidential aspirant.

3. Feminist Bildungsroman

In this light, let us return to the opening paragraph to reread the subse- quent sentences: “I was free to make choices unavailable to past generations of women in my own country and inconceivable to many women in the world today. I came of age on the crest of tumultuous social change and took part in the political battles fought over the meaning of America and its role in the world” (1). Here the narrator positions herself as a historical figure in what Berlant terms the “crisis of the national future”—the struggle of those historically excluded from full citizenship to claim full, rather than partial, citizenship in a collective founded on the “abstract principles of democratic nationality” (18). This self- positioning introduces a second generic mode into Living History, the feminist bildungsroman. The “arrival” in a Senate seat for the former First Lady is the culmination of the feminist fable of the struggle for full citizenship, the arrival in “Washington City” as a senator. We observe the voice and form of feminist bildungsroman when the narrator tells us what it was like to be “a woman”—in a Seven Sisters college, in the anti-war movement, in law school, in the campaign, in the governor’s mansion, in the law firm, in the White House, and on the senatorial campaign trail. We hear it also when she parses her discomforts with gendered roles, her negotiations of gender bias, and her analysis of gender ideology in action. This “Hillary” is positioned as generational sym- bol, “America’s Exhibit A” (141), the embodiment of the future of America’s second-wave feminism and of “America” itself. The feminist bildungsroman produces its authenticity effects by con- densing the ur-story of second-wave feminism. Clinton’s narrative is the

“America’s Exhibit A”: Hillary Clinton’s Living History 11 generational auto/biography of women fighting for equality in the work- place and in national politics for some thirty years, of women competing in the world despite formidable obstacles, accumulating success and power as entrepreneurial feminists, projecting themselves as individualist agents of change. Its claim to authenticity is an effect of its triumphalist plot of achievement against the odds, and its tacit acknowledgment that most women have to work far harder than men to get respect, that women cannot just “be” charismatic political personali- ties. “America’s Exhibit A” reiterates the individualist plot of develop- ment and possessive masculinity of liberal feminism. The mobilization of feminist bildungsroman in Living History exposes the realness norms pervading and defining modernist autobiography as masculinist norms. And it strips the normative narrative that is the nation’s privileged fable of American political identity of its gendered features, contesting the gendered content of the viable political persona. Doing so, it would remake the nation as more fully inclusive, women’s citizenship as full rather than partial, and “Hillary” as a real candidate. And yet the liberal feminist move to resituate the narrator from the subject of modernist bildungsroman to the subject of feminist bildungsroman does not necessarily promise full generic citizenship. What Margaret Henderson observes of the feminist bildungsroman form in the autobiographies of Robin Morgan and Betty Friedan illuminates the difficulty of claiming legitimate or “real” political power through a revisionary mode: “In liberal feminist fashion, they modify rather than transform the genre, which forms an uncanny parallel to the limited concessions granted by the social order of late capitalism to accommo- date feminist demands” (171). Further, even as Living History presents a paradigmatic story invok- ing legacies of 1970s’ liberal feminist discourse, two specters haunt the grammar of the feminist bildungsroman. First is the specter of what Rush Limbaugh calls a “feminazi,” the woman too strident, humorless, power-hungry, and threatening to elect to lead the nation. This alterna- tive version of the real “Hillary” had long circulated in hostile media that portrayed her as a lying, coldhearted “bitch,” a scandalous persona. We sense this ghost every time the narrator makes a joke and pokes fun at herself. Second is the specter of the feminist who failed to assert her agency to sever a relationship that had been the source of betrayal and public humiliation. The first specter is the specter of too much femi-