Words of witness
Subtitle: black women's autobiography in the post-Brown era
By: Angela A. Ards
Series: Wisconsin studies in autobiography; Wisconsin studies in autobiography
Publisher: The University of Wisconsin Press; University of Wisconsin Press
Published: 2016
Place of publication: Madison, Wisconsin
Language: eng
Number of pages: 250
ISBN-13: 9780299305048; 9780299305031
Copyright date: 2016
Subjects: Autobiography; African American women; African American women authors; Women authors; African American authors; African American feminists; Political aspects; Biography
Description: "A literary and political genealogy of the last half-century, Words of Witness explores black feminist autobiographical narratives in the context of activism and history since the landmark 1954 segregation case, Brown v. Board of Education. Angela A. Ards examines how activist writers, especially five whose memoirs were published in the 1990s and 2000s, crafted these life stories to engage and shape progressive, post-Brown politics. Exploring works by the critically acclaimed June Jordan and Edwidge Danticat, as well as by popular and emerging authors such as Melba Beals, Rosemary Bray, and Eisa Davis, Ards demonstrates how each text asserts countermemories to official - and often nostalgic - understandings of the civil rights and Black Power movements. She situates each writer as activist-citizen, adopting and remaking particular roles - warrior, "the least of these," immigrant, hip-hop head - to crystallize a range of black feminist responses to urgent but unresolved political issues"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: Post-Brown political aesthetics; title: Beyond the strong black woman in Melba Beals's Warriors Don't Cry; title: Reclaiming the radicalism of social interdependence in Rosemary Bray's Unafraid of the Dark: A Memoir; title: Honoring the past to move forward in June Jordan's Soldier: A Poet's Childhood; title: Collective storytelling as diasporic consciousness in Edwidge Danticat's Brother, I'm Dying; title: Cultivating liberatory joy in Eisa Davis's Angela's Mixtape; title: Epilogue: Teaching "the people": bodies, material histories, and the project of black feminist autobiography.