At the 2011 MLA, Sidonie Smith invited Marianne Hirsch, Françoise Lionnet, Nancy Miller, Robert Warrior and me to speak at her Presidential Forum on Narrating Lives. The essays were published in Profession. My essay, “Embedded Lives,” tells how a historical event became narrated through different media and disciplinary discourses by a number of participants, through many years and in different spaces. It takes the 1977 eviction of a group of elderly Filipinos from the International Hotel in San Francisco, and the protests against that eviction, as a starting point of a series of imbricated stories that lead up to today. It argues for the importance of collective voice.
