Autobiography is a central genre of African American literature. It emerged with the early slave narratives in the late eighteenth century and remains influential today, when films like Twelve Years a Slave, Steve McQueen’s 2013 adaptation of Solomon Northup’s eponymous 1853 autobiography, and Nate Parker’s 2016 adaptation of the white lawyer Thomas Ruffin Gray’s 1831 publication of Nat Turner’s The Confessions of Nat Turner revisit the long history of U.S. slavery through the lens of their autobiographical source materials.  In this course, we will connect a theoretical concern for the narrative structures and a literary interest in the contents and communicative strategies of African American autobiography with a historical focus on the evolution of politically significant notions of black selfhood and black identity. We will analyze works by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Booker T. Washington, Zora Neale Hurston, Malcolm X, Angela Davis, and others.