Reading African American Autobiography
Twenty-First-Century Contexts and Criticism
- 248 pages
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
About This Book
This timely volume embraces and interprets the increasingly broad and deep canon of life narratives by African Americans. The contributors discover and recover neglected lives, texts, and genres, enlarge the wide range of critical methods used by scholars to study these works, and expand the understanding of autobiography to encompass photography, comics, blogs, and other modes of self-expression. This book also examines at length the proliferation of African American autobiography in the twenty-first century, noting the roles of digital genres, remediated lives, celebrity lives, self-help culture, non-Western religious traditions, and the politics of adoption.
The life narratives studied range from an eighteenth-century criminal narrative, a 1918 autobiography, and the works of Richard Wright to new media, graphic novels, and a celebrity memoir from Pam Grier.
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Table of contents
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: African American Autobiography in the âAge of Obamaâ - Eric D. Lamore
- âA Dying Manâ: The Outlaw Body of Arthur, 1768 - Lynn A. Casmier-Paz
- Early Black Menâs Spiritual Autobiography: Marriage and Violence - Joycelyn K. Moody
- Olaudah Equiano in the United States: Abigail Mottâs 1829 Abridged Edition of the Interesting Narrative - Eric D. Lamore
- The Visual Properties of Black Autobiography: The Case of William J. Edwards - Anthony S. Foy
- Richard Wrightâs Environments: Mediating Personhood through the Southâs Second Nature - Susan Scott Parrish
- âA Space of Concentrationâ: The Autobiographical Comics of Richard âGrassâ Green and Samuel R. Delany - Brian Cremins
- Born into This Body: Black Womenâs Use of Buddhism in Autobiographical Narratives - Tracy Curtis
- From Blog to Books: Angela Nissel, Authorship, and the Digital Public Sphere - Linda Furgerson Selzer
- Grafted Belongings: Identification in Autobiographical Narratives of African American Transracial Adoptees - Marina Fedosik
- Reading Signs of Crazy: Pam Grier, a Black Feminist in Praxis - Kwakiutl L. Dreher
- Contributors
- Index