The volume Women's Autobiographies and Memoirs 1920-2025: Precarity, Resistance and Selfhood attempts to look into the dialectics of identity and writing - the compulsion to respond to the other inhabiting the self, which provokes in her something peculiar and singular - a text of one's own. The self-authenticated narratives are often haunted by many an unsubduable voice that breaks open the self-centred finitude of living and dying. Women's memoirs and self-writings essentially emphasise what remains subjective in her and burst through the personal and intimate, a curious admixture of the elements of "the life" with those of the act of writing that underlies the primal drive(s) for self-preservation and a will to truth. Can we think of autobiography as self-identity or as de-facement? Embodying the possibility of being a capacious space for including intersectional perspectives from feminist, postcolonial, and postmodern theoretical axes, these writings from South Asia address complex issues of subjectivity, identity and frontiers of authority.  

Memoirs and autobiographies became the site for major theoretical debates in the late twentieth century about the question of female selfhood and subjectivity, the formation of (gendered) identity within language, never fully realised. The generic boundaries of autobiography have been constantly reconfigured and reconstituted to render flexibility and withstand challenges and criticism. Moreover, the genre of autoethnographic writing, sometimes self-affirmative in nature, puts forward an intersectional analysis of women's precarity and vulnerability, a heightened exposure to violence, poverty, and exploitation, lacking social protection and facing job insecurity, forced labour and trafficking, their everyday and political struggle against an embedded precarity in terms of class, caste, gender and race. 

The volume seeks to place "writing the self" texts in the colonial and postcolonial neo-liberal capitalist context and understand the strategies through which women combine the power of storytelling and recounting their life-experiences; the postcolonialist-autobiographer stands out and grapples with her conflicting relationship(s)with and lineaments into the epistemic violation of colonialism. It also offers close and analytical reflections on the autobiographical narratives or memoirs written by contemporary Dalit/Adivasi authors and indigenous minority peoples in their mother tongue. It examines the question(s) of representation and self-representation, their "discursive precarity" in a situation of postcoloniality, spotlighting the types of silencing and suppression, the cuts and wounds within, discrimination and exclusion meted out by various ideological/socio-cultural systems of deliberate ostracism, political banishment, and the perpetuation of segregation. The experimental life-writing forms or feminist autobiographies, in a way, capture the journeys from subjugation to empowerment, women's struggles and resistance against societal norms, resilience in the face of adversities, and their role as agents of change within communities. Through a close examination of the contestations and dialogues in this ever-evolving genre of study, the chapters aim to critique the notion of a unified signifier of womanhood, bring in the subject of power asymmetries, and locate varied personal histories, lived realities, and desiring bodies.

Themes of Focus:

The proposed book attempts to include a range of connected issues within its fold to arrive at a nuanced understanding of multiple constructions of selfhood and the constituted subjectivities in South Asia. We are particularly interested in papers that address, but are not limited to, the following key themes:  

• The Lens of Ecopoetics
• Incarcerations and concomitant selfhood
• Axes of Sexual Labour 
• Caste Marginalities
• Transgender Narratives
• Religious Minorities
• The everyday and the economies of Home
• Autobiography and Autothanatography

Submission Guidelines:

• Abstracts should be no more than 300 words and must clearly outline the central argument, theoretical framework, and specific works or texts being analyzed.
• Submissions should be in English
• Full papers (approximately 5,000-7,000 words should be formatted according to the latest MLA edition.
• Include a short biographical statement (100-150 words) with your name, contact information, and institutional affiliation (if applicable)

Please send your abstract and biography in one document to autobiographywomen26@gmail.com

Timeline:

Abstracts due: 15 May 2026

Notification of acceptance/rejection: 10 June  2026

Full Chapter Due: 30 September 2026

Editors:

Dr Anirban Bhattacharjee

Dr Suranjana Choudhury