Autobiography as Activism: Three Black Women of the Sixties
Where autobiographies are popular and race and gender studies have strong appeal, this demanding but thought-provoking analysis of the autobiographies of Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, and Elaine Brown will find readers. English and American Studies professor Perkins approaches her subjects' compositions from several different directions: comparing the three women's backgrounds and personal objectives; outlining their literary antecedents; discussing experiences each writer views as critical in her decision to be an activist; considering each autobiographer's pedagogical and polemical goals in telling her story; and exploring the interplay between the Black Power movement memoirs written by men and women activists, and between the earliest such narratives and those written more recently. Perkins celebrates this interplay, with all its conflicts, suggesting that "the Truth of the Movement . . . [is] best captured when many people remember together."Mary CarrollCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.