Life writing often explores the profound impact of border crossings, both physical and metaphorical. Writers navigate personal and cultural boundaries, reflecting on identity, belonging, and the transformative power of crossing thresholds. These narratives unveil the complexities of migration, immigration, or internal journeys, offering intimate perspectives on adapting to new environments or confronting internal conflicts. Un/Bound is a collection of essays about such narratives, with an emphasis on mobility and border metaphors, the ethical dimensions of cross-border storytelling, and questions of access, translation, and circulation. Scholarly interest in borders, mobility, and related topics has greatly intensified in the context of public health emergencies and recent conflicts in international relations. The chapters in this book contribute to this dialogue by exploring internal and external, and physical and abstract borders and divisions.
This book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literature, translation studies and political philosophy. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies.
Introduction
Megan Brown and Helga Lenart-Cheng
1. Resisting Confinement Through Translation: Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend But the Mountains
Frances Egan
2. Flawed Border Crossings in Life Writing by Fabienne Kanor and Gisèle Pineau
Natalie Edwards and Christopher Hogarth
3. Visual Culture and Diasporic Self -Writing: Wajdi Mouawad Paints His Way Home
Claire Reising
4. Archives in Motion: Transitional Sites of Identity in Narratives of Displacement
Katrina M. Powell
5. “The Distance … That Had Been Traversed”: Education, Identity, and Public Literacy in Tara Westover’s Educated and Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory
Ilana M. Blumberg
6. “A Home in My Body”: Migration, Infection, and Privilege in Porochista Khakpour’s Sick
Chloe R. Green
7. Teaching Women’s Auto|Bio Stories: Student Engagement through Creative, Multimodal Storytelling—Fostering Inclusion and Diversity through Transcultural Stories of Migration and Change
Anahita Bayat
8. Loss Made Visible: Women’s Graphic Memoirs and the Boundlessness of Grief
Heidi Elisabeth Bollinger
Biography
Megan Brown is Professor of English and Director of Writing at Drake University, where she teaches courses on nonfiction narrative as well as contemporary U.S. literature/cultural studies. She is author of The Cultural Work of Corporations (2009) as well as American Autobiography After 9/11 (2017).
Helga Lenart-Cheng is Professor at Saint Mary’s College of California. Her research focuses on algorithmic storytelling, critical media studies, theories of narrative, subjectivity and memory, phenomenological hermeneutics, and world literature. Her most recent book, Story Revolutions (2022) studies the role of collective storytelling in democracy.
