ABSTRACT

This volume harnesses the virtual explosion of narrative writing in contemporary academic international politics. It comprises a prologue, an epilogue, and sixteen chapters that both build upon and diversify the success of the 2011 volume Autobiographical International Relations . Here, as in that volume, academics place their narratives in the context of world politics, culture, and history. Contributors explore moments in their academic lives that are often inexpressible in the standard academic voice and which, in turn, require a different way of writing and knowing. They write in the belief that academic IR has already begun to benefit from a different kind of writing—a stylae that retrieves the I and explicitly demonstrates its presence both within the world and within academic writing. By working within the overlap between theory, history, and autobiography, these chapters aim to increase the clarity, urgency, and meaningfulness of academic work. Highlighting the autoethnographic and autobiographic turn in critical international relations, this work will be of great interest to students and scholars in international relations, IR theory and global politics.

chapter 1|4 pages

Permitted urgency

A prologue

chapter 3|10 pages

Dissolutions of the self

chapter 4|16 pages

Simultaneous translation

Finding my core in the periphery

chapter 6|9 pages

The banality of survival

chapter 7|14 pages

Letters to Yvonne

Words and/as worlds

chapter 8|10 pages

Your East Africa, my Pacific Northwest

A commercial view of Tanzania from an unfamiliar vantage

chapter 9|7 pages

Loss of a loss

Ground Zero, Spring 2014 1

chapter 10|18 pages

Contradictions

chapter 11|17 pages

“Was will das Weib?” 1

Politics, film, desire

chapter 12|14 pages

What might still sputter forth

chapter 13|6 pages

Auto/bio/graph

chapter 14|12 pages

The smell of wood

Recuperating loss in a country of forgetting

chapter 15|20 pages

Immobility, intimacy, movement

Translating death, life, and border crossings

chapter 17|7 pages

Dancing modernity

An epilogue