Constructing the Self: Essays on Southern Life-Writing

The book progresses from analyses of the subversive quality of the earliest autobiographical writings by African Americans, narratives reconciling the self across the color line, blurred generic boundaries between autobiography and fiction, and on to further transgressions of the memoir genre, to en...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inPolish Journal for American Studies Vol. 13; pp. 150 - 154
Main Author Niewiadomska-Flis, Urszula
Format Book Review
LanguageEnglish
Published Warsaw University of Warsaw 01.04.2019
Subjects
African Americans
Angelou, Maya (1928-2014)
Autobiographies
Collaboration
Essays
Fiction
Fletcher, John Gould (1886-1950)
Genre
Narratives
Novels
Politics
Race
Walker, Alice (1944- )
Writers
Writing
United States > US
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Summary:The book progresses from analyses of the subversive quality of the earliest autobiographical writings by African Americans, narratives reconciling the self across the color line, blurred generic boundaries between autobiography and fiction, and on to further transgressions of the memoir genre, to end with the final section, devoted to pilgrimages of self-discovery. The book opens with the section "Subversive (re)creations of the Self - Past and Present" which has two essays in which renowned southern literary critics analyze how African American life-writing authors constructed themselves in a social environment which conspired against them. In the opening essay "'My Story is Better than Yours': The Changing Politics of and Motives for Composing Southern African American Life Narratives," Trudier Harris analyzes the contrasting impulses that moved African American southern writers: the impulse to bear witness to a collective experience (communal concerns, Frederick Douglass or Booker T. Washington) or to engage in literary self-creation (individualistic concerns, e.g. Zora Neal Hurston), or to express social consciousness (embracing activism, e.g. Maya Angelou, Alice Walker or Anne Moody). [...]Yousaf claims that one informs the other: the hybridity of the genre (Labro's text as either "an autobiographical novel", "true tale" or "a memoirlike novel") might reflect the transcultural perspective on a book written by a French journalist who was an international student in Virginia in the 1950s.
ISSN:1733-9154
2544-8781