The African Diaspora and Autobiographics

Interdisciplinary and cross-cultural in approach, African Diaspora and Autobiographics locates the dialogic and symbiotic connection between diverse autobiographical accounts of writers in the African diaspora. Beginning with an analysis of the abolitionist narratives of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ex-slaves, Olaudah Equiano and Harriet Jacobs, Chinosole traces the political and aesthetic linkages between these early writings and autobiographical literature produced by writers in the twentieth century, namely Richard Wright, Peter Abrahams, George Lamming, Agostinho Neto, Audre Lorde, Assata Shakur, and Evelyn Williams. African Diaspora and Autobiographics focuses on the affirmative function of African autobiography as a counter-hegemonic response to the history of racist representation and, more important, as a powerful enactment of Black iconography in the struggle for liberation.