Cultural Studies and Media Studies / American/Diaspora

Hybrid: The session will be held in-person but a few remote presentations may be included.

Titilola Aiyegbusi (University of Toronto)

Collective Selves: Rethinking Autobiography Beyond the Individual.

Philippe Lejeune's influential formulation of the autobiographical pact has long shaped autobiography studies. The pact presumes an aligned author, narrator, and protagonist, and simultaneously privileges the singular, first-person life narrative as the normative autobiographical form. However, several personal narratives resist these assumptions. Edited autobiographies, oral histories, collaborative memoirs, and interview-based narratives often construct an autobiographical "I"/protagonist that is multiple rather than singular and that emerges across the voices of individuals whose experiences collectively narrate a shared history. Likewise, some collective life narratives depart from conventional autobiography structures, appearing as fragmented accounts, interwoven testimonies, or dispersed chapters within larger texts.

This panel invites papers that examine forms of self-representation that foreground the collective. Particularly of interest are papers that interrogate the presumed unity of author, narrator, and protagonist; reconsider the autobiographical pact in light of collaborative and collective forms of narration; and explore how communities write themselves into history through shared acts of remembrance, testimony, and self-representation.

Topics to consider include, but are not limited to:

Collaborative and edited autobiographies Oral histories and interview-based life narratives Community and collective testimony Indigenous, Black, and diasporic collective life writing Gender, Sexuality and self testaments Archives, memory, and community self-representation Theoretical reconsiderations of the autobiographical pact and authorial voice Experimental and hybrid forms of autobiography Collective authorship, voice, and narrative authority Life writing, activism, and community formation

By centering collective modes of self-account, this panel seeks to expand the boundaries of autobiography studies and establish interventions that consider how communities, rather than individuals alone, become autobiographical subjects.

Titi Aiyegbusi titi.aiyegbusi@mail.utoronto.ca

This panel reconsiders the autobiographical pact by examining collaborative and collective forms of narration that resist the presumed unity of author, narrator, and protagonist. Particularly of interest are papers that interrogate how communities write themselves into history through shared acts of remembrance, testimony, and self-representation, and how such narratives reconfigure the boundaries of autobiography.