Autobiography and Black identity politics : racialization in twentieth-century America / Kenneth Mostern.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Mostern, Kenneth.

Series:

Cultural margins

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

African Americans--Race identity.

African Americans.

African Americans--Politics and government.

Autobiography--Political aspects--United States.

Autobiography.

Autobiography--African American authors.

United States--Race relations.

United States.

Race relations.

African Americans--Biography.

Genre:

Biographies.

Physical Description:

xii, 280 pages ; 22 cm.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Summary:

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 Bais, Zora Neale Hurston, Malcolm X, 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.

Contents:

Part 1 Theorizing race, autobiography, and identity politics

1 What is identity politics? Race and the autobiographical 3

2 African-American autobiography and the field of autobiography studies 28

Part 2 The politics of Negro self-representation

3 Three theories of the race of W. E. B. Du Bois 57

4 The gender, race, and culture of anti-lynching politics in the Jim Crow era 83

5 Representing the Negro as proletarian 112

Part 3 The dialectics of home: gender, nation and blackness since the 1960s

6 Malcolm X and the grammar of redemption 137

7 The political identity "woman" as emergent from the space of Black Power 164

8 Home and profession in black feminism 189.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 262-274) and index.

ISBN:

0521641144

0521646790

OCLC:

39615240