Autobiography and Black identity politics : racialization in twentieth-century America /
Kenneth Mostern.
- Cambridge, U.K. ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 1999.
- 1 online resource (xii, 280 pages)
- Cultural margins ; v. 6 .
- Cultural margins ; v. 6. .
Includes bibliographical references (pages 262-274) and index.
Theorizing race, autobiography, and identity politics -- What is identity politics? Race and the autobiographical -- African-American autobiography and the field of autobiography studies -- The politics of Negro self-representation -- Three theories of the race of W.E.B. Du Bois -- The gender, race, and culture of anti-lynching politics in the Jim Crow era -- Representing the Negro as proletarian -- The dialectics of home: gender, nation and blackness since the 1960s -- Malcolm X and the grammar of redemption -- The political identity "woman" as emergent from the space of Black Power -- Home and profession in black feminism.
"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, Malcolm X, Paul Robeson, Angela Davis, and bell hooks. This wide-ranging study will interest all those working in African-American studies, cultural studies, and literary theory."--Jacket.