To Tell an Unfree Story: Black Autobiography from Confinement

Catalog description

Scholarly writing about black autobiography often forwards the genre as evidence of a twinned corporal and intellectual freedom. In a seminal work in the field, To Tell a Free Story (1986), William L. Andrews posits the origin of the black autobiographical tradition in slave narratives, wherein the escaped or emancipated are able to exercise authentic selfhood and seize authorial power through the writing of their life stories. While most canonical works in the genre--the Narrative (1845) of Frederick Douglass is in this category, as are later titles by Richard Wright, Claude Brown, and Malcolm X--do fit this model, many others do not. Taking Harriet Jacobs"s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) as its foundational text, this course examines work by black autobiographers for whom escape is improbable and freedom is a more tenuous, elusive, or ambiguous experience. Readings from incarceration, poverty, and disability memoirs provide us with occasion to consider the degree to which confinement (also containment, constraint) emerges as a feature, a circumstance, and even a condition of possibility for black life writing. This study of unfree storytelling aims to challenge, extend and complicate our understandings of black autobiographical traditions; it also compels us to rethink notions of self, approaches to creative practice, and the status of black life.