Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Contested Lives, Contesting Lives
• Ricia Anne Chansky and Laura J. Beard
• Section One: Tracing Patterns 
• Dakobijigaade mii miinawaa Aaba’igaade Gichimookomaanakiing: Tied and Untied in America
• Margaret Noodin
• Negotiating National Identity and Well-Being in US Black Women’s Diaries
• Joycelyn K. Moody
• The Legacy of Conquest in Comics: Texas History Movies, Jack Jackson, and Revision
• Daniel Worden
• “Strange Juxtapositions”: Elliott Erwitt’s Visual Diary of Cold War America
• Steven Hoelscher
• We Have Never Been a Nation of Immigrants: Refugee Temporality as American Identity
• Elizabeth Rodrigues
• “A small flashlight in a great dark space”: Elizabeth Warren, Autobiography, and Populism
• Rachael McLennan
• Indians in Monumental Places: Heid Erdich and Jeff Thomas
• Laura J. Beard
• Juneteenth
• Angela Ards
• Archival Intervention: Surviving the “Savage Splintering” in Deborah Miranda’s Bad Indians
• Hertha D. Sweet Wong
• Section Two: Facing Forward 
• Moving Beyond the Urban/Rural Divide in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home
• Katie Hogan
• White Privilege and J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy
• Stephanie Li)
• Getting Schooled: Responses to Education as Neoliberal Identity-Formation in US Life Narratives
• Megan Brown
• Disabling Birth: Prognostic Certainty and the Gestating Citizen of the Contemporary Midwifery Movement
• Ally Day
• Afterword
• Days of Reckoning: Prospects for Life Narrative 2020
• Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson
• Contributors
• Index

About the Author

Laura J. Beard is an associate vice president of research innovation at the University of Alberta.
Ricia Anne Chansky is a professor of literature at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez, coeditor of the scholarly journal, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, and editor of the Routledge Auto/Biography Studies book series.

Reviews

"Timely, relevant, and innovative. The editors have assembled a powerful chorus of established and emerging voices of auto/biography critics and practitioners of life writing to make a compelling argument for rewriting the nation's imaginary. By centering subjects who have been marginalized, erased, and excluded from traditional national myths, this urgently needed collection has the potential to become a canonical text."--Eva C. Karpinski, York University