Reading African American Autobiography: Twenty-First-Century Contexts and Criticism

Description

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. Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: African American Autobiography in the “Age of Obama” - Eric D. Lamore “A Dying Man”: The Outlaw Body of Arthur, 1768 - Lynn A. Casmier-Paz Early Black Men’s Spiritual Autobiography: Marriage and Violence - Joycelyn K. Moody Olaudah Equiano in the United States: Abigail Mott’s 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 Wright’s Environments: Mediating Personhood through the South’s Second Nature - Susan Scott Parrish “A Space of Concentration”: The Autobiographical Comics of Richard “Grass” Green and Samuel R. Delany - Brian Cremins Born into This Body: Black Women’s 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