Autobiography and Black Identity Politics: Racialization in Twentieth-Century America / Edition 1

by Kenneth Mostern

Overview

Why has autobiography been central to African American political speech throughout the twentieth century? 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. This wide-ranging study will interest all those working in African American Studies, cultural studies and literary theory.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521646796
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	06/13/1999
Series:	Cultural Margins , #7
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	294
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.60(d)
Lexile:	1690L (what's this?)

Table of Contents

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.

Editorial Reviews

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

From the Publisher