Autobiography and Black Identity Politics

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.

• Combines autobiography and race theory in twentieth-century African American writing • Major survey of black culture in US • Very topical, autobiography a perenially interesting theme

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.