#BLM Militant Memoirs: Cartographies of a Movement and/or Portraits of Activist Selves?

Dealing in turn with When They Call You a Terrorist. A Black Lives Matter Memoir (2018), by BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors, and Charlene Carruthers’s Unapologetic. A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements (2018), this article first addresses these political activists’ works as belonging to the genre of militant autobiographies. It then analyzes Cullors’s memoir as private testimony on the American government’s rhetoric of terror and turns to a treatment of the private self in relation to collective struggle. The second part of this analysis focuses on Carruthers’s memoir as “history, theory, practice and vision.” For the black feminist queer militant, intersectionality as praxis helps face contradictions to surmount them. Along the lines of the Chicago model of community organizing, she delineates a mandate for future revolutionary struggles. In sum, Cullors’s focus on the private self gives way to the effacement of subjectivity in the name of collective interest in Carruthers’s work.