The language of the self: autobiographies and testimonies.

Autobiography is a protean genre: it covers so many forms and styles. When narrating one's life, the narrator has to choose what he or she considers to be relevant and decisive. Aside from the differences on what is fundamental in a life, the notion of the Self is culturally defined and thus varies from one place to another. The author of an autobiographical text may express only a fragment of his or her life or follow a thread in the trajectory through reminiscences, memoirs, diaries, testimonies, interviews, letters, poems, etc. The author may declare openly that he or she are identical with the protagonist or may give the principal character a different name or no name. The author may depict private or public events, at times taking imaginative license or even including fantastic motifs.

Autobiographical discourse is not only culturally conditioned; it is also symptomatic of the cultural moment. Thus it is important to explore the varieties of self-presentation, and not assume a fixed paradigm. In this revisionist spirit that looks for different and alternative ways of recording one's life, Alif presents the autobiographical drive in multiple contexts: ancient and contemporary Egyptian, nineteenth-century and twentieth-century Arab, Moroccan and Iraqi, South African and West African, Canadian and American, Palestinian and Sudanese, English and Irish, and even that of a hybrid background-Chinese American and Algerian French.

There has been a tremendous surge in autobiographical writing in recent years, and the field has been redefined by literary and cultural critics. From James Olney (ed.), Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (1980) to Dwight Reynolds (ed.), Interpreting the Self. Autobiography in the Arabic Literary Tradition (2001), a range of works has appeared challenging established views and approaches on the subject of autobiography. The epigraphs (whose English translations are drawn from the works mentioned above) attest to the complexity and diversity of motivations in writing about one's past life.

Alif, a refereed multilingual journal appearing annually in the spring, presents articles in Arabic, English and occasionally French. The different traditions and languages confront and complement each other in its pages. Each issue includes and welcomes original articles. The next issues will center on the following themes:

   Alif 23: Intersections: Literature and the Sacred.
   Alif 24: Archeology of Literature: Tracing the Old in the New.
   Alif 25: Edward Said and Critical Decolonization.