African American Autobiography and Black Life Writing

Abstract From their acquisition of English, African Americans have found it imperative to represent their lives and lived experiences to themselves, each other, Euro-Americans, and any others interested in the African diaspora. Indeed, Africans brought with them to the Americas various rich traditions of individual and collective life storytelling methods. In 19th-century United States, slave narratives published before and after the Civil War dictated the rhetorical structures of virtually all Black American literary forms, including autobiographical albums and culinary memoirs. The most famous antebellum slave narrative remains the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, the first of three book-length slave narratives Douglass would pen. Some antebellum slave narratives were dictated to amanuenses; among the best-known of these is the Narrative of Sojourner Truth, written in the third person by Olive Gilbert and published in 1850. Harriet Jacobs’s anonymously published Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself was restored to readers’ and critics’ attention when Jean Fagan Yellin verified that Jacobs was an actual person born in Edenton, North Carolina, in 1813. Each of these formerly enslaved authors expressed a common desire by publishing their life stories: to give witness to the atrocities integral to the slave trade, which persisted despite laws forbidding it, and to the institution of slavery. Furthermore, each slave narrative made a case for the abolition of slavery and for Black people’s fundamental humanity—their birthright to freedom and citizenship. Nineteenth-century freeborn Black Americans published auto/biographies that recounted their lives as activists, educators, ministers, professional writers, and laborers. These life stories, like slave narratives, argue that people of African descent have basic human needs for freedom and creative self-expression. They also detail the brutal race-based hatred and maltreatment of Black people by white Americans. Nineteenth-century auto/biographies by freeborn persons emphasize the psychological devastation Black people often suffer after white violence and their resilience. Overall, Black Life Writing since abolition has noted the same originating impulse: the perceived necessity of substantiating Black humanity and self-determination and documenting anti-Black atrocities. Since 1900, Black American autobiographers have adopted an extensive range of tropes and discursive styles to shape their life narratives, from migration stories like Langston Hughes’s The Big Sea to political memoirs such as The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois to digital and online blogs cum print texts, like Quinta Brunson’s autobiographical essays, She Memes Well. Moreover, people of African descent have studied how Black Life Writing has developed in print cultures such that there has been a steady inquiry into the formation of Black identity and African diasporic self-representation in texts from the early 19th century onward. The 1960s establishment of academic African American studies centered African diasporic and Black American lived experience, often in the form of authors’ first-person accounts. Black auto/biography and Life Writing, together with Black Life Writing studies, are some of the most prominent discourses in which people of African descent contribute I-witness to the historical record.