Autobiography and Black Identity Politics
Racialization in Twentieth-Century America

A study of autobiography in twentieth-century African American culture.

Kenneth Mostern (Author)

9780521641142, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 17 June 1999

294 pages
21.6 x 14 x 2.1 cm, 0.52 kg

"Mostern provides intriguing readings of...the autobiographies he presents." American Literature

Why has autobiography been central to African American political speech throughout the twentieth century? What is it about the racialization process that persistently places African Americans in the position of speaking from personal experience? In Autobiography and Black Identity Politics: Racialization in Twentieth-Century America, Kenneth Mostern illustrates the relationship between narrative and racial categories such as 'colored', 'Negro', 'black' or 'African American' in the work of writers such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Malcom X, Martin Luther King, Paul Robeson, Angela Davis and bell hooks. Mostern shows how these autobiographical narratives attempt to construct and transform the political meanings of blackness. The relationship between a black masculine identity that emerged during the 1960s, and the counter-movement of black feminism since the 1970s, is also discussed. This wide-ranging study will interest all those working in African American studies, cultural studies and literary theory.

Part I. Theorizing Race, Autobiography, and Identity Politics: 1. What is identity politics? Race and the autobiographical
2. African American autobiography and the field of autobiography studies
Part II. The Politics of Negro Self-Representation: 3. Three theories of of the race of of W. E. B. Du Bois
4. The gender, race and culture of anti-lynching politics in the Jim Crow era
5. Representing the Negro as proletarian
Part III. The Dialectics of Home: Gender, Nation and Blackness Since the 1960s: 6. Malcolm X and the grammar of redemption
7. The political identity 'woman' s emergent from the space of black power
8. Home and profession in black feminism.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH], Literary theory [DSA]