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.
- Dozent/in: Daniel Stein