“Sweet Home”: Audre Lorde's Zami and the legacies of American Writing

2009 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-317 ◽  
Author(s):  
MONICA B. PEARL
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Coming Out ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
Audre Lorde ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
American Life ◽  
Forms Of Life

Although Audre Lorde calls the narrative of her life Zami: A New Spelling of My Name a “biomythography,” suggesting that the life of an African American lesbian cannot be told in any previously available generic forms of life-writing or self-expression, Zami actually derives from two extant American literary traditions – the African American slave narrative and the lesbian coming out story – rendering it, after all, not a marginal text, but rather a text that falls obviously and firmly in a tradition of American literature. Both traditions turn siginificantly on the trope of “home,” of finding a home where one belongs. In finding the “home” that she is seeking not, ultimately, geographically, but, rather, generically – in the very text she is writing – Lorde's life story also ends up signifying the similarity of these two ostensibly disparate forms: the slave narrative and the coming out story, suggesting a common narrative trajectory of marginal American identities in the tradition of American life-writing.

Post-Black Satire

2019 ◽  
pp. 105-140
Author(s):  
Yogita Goyal
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
Underground Railroad ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
History Of ◽  
Paul Beatty ◽  
Distinct Body

This chapter collides the idiom of post-blackness with the dominant genre of the neo-slave narrative in contemporary African American literature. This distinct body of work—post-black neo-slave narratives—mines the historical scene of slavery in the mode of satire. Through absurd juxtapositions, surreal analogies, and farcical adventures, post-black satirists expose the contradictions of the insistence on the unending history of slavery amid declarations of a break from previous racial regimes. Viewing satire as the lens through which debates about race and postracialism articulate, the chapter explores how fictions by Paul Beatty and Mat Johnson combat the sentimental template of abolition and neo-abolition by refusing to collapse past and present. The chapter concludes with a look at what might be termed a post-black post-satire, as Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016) stretches time and space to transform the slave narrative into a flexible portal to practices of exploitation worldwide.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terrence T. Tucker
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Julia Kristeva ◽  
Malcolm X ◽  
Ishmael Reed ◽  
American Life ◽  
History Of ◽  
Definition Of

This chapter establishes the definition of comic rage and traces the history of humor and militancy in African American literature and history. It distinguishes between comic rage and satire, culminating in an examination of George Schuyler’s Black No More. It details how comic rage acts as an abjection (from Julia Kristeva) that breaks down simplistic ideas about race and representations that appear in literature and popular culture. While identifying Richard Pryor as the most recognizable employer of comic rage, this chapter also points to figures like Sutton Griggs, Ishmael Reed, and Malcolm X; who embody the multiple combinations of anger and comedy that appear in the chapters of the book. It outlines the contents of the chapters that trace the development of comic rage in relation to the various political and literary moments in American and African American life.

Epilogue

2019 ◽  
pp. 317-322
Author(s):  
William L. Andrews
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Nineteenth Century American Literature ◽  
Full Diversity ◽  
Large Numbers

The epilogue notes that kinship, privilege, occupation, intragroup status, and social mobility affected crucial transitions in self-awareness as well as class awareness among the narrators. Growing self-respect kindled in many narrators a desire for a future that coalesced around an imagined free self. Narrating this process of inner growth individualized and liberated African American personhood in mid-century literature. Slave narratives from this generation created the most sophisticated commentary on caste and class in the South to be found in nineteenth-century American literature. In the late nineteenth century, former slaves continued to publish autobiographies in large numbers. Their experiences in slavery and perspectives on it were often very different from those of the antebellum narrators. Without taking into account the slave narratives published between 1865 and 1901, our comprehension of slavery and the full diversity of African American self-portraiture in the slave narrative will remain limited and partial.

scholarly journals Music of Survival: A Search for Identity in the Works of Richard Wright

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (8) ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Shadan Jafri
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Richard Wright ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
Social Equality ◽  
American Life ◽  
The People

The complexly changing nature of American life and the vigorous versatility and all-encompassing spread of the written record are the marks of American literature. Social forces always make their imprint on literature. Especially in America where the democratic processes bring the people into immediate familiarity with and sensitive response to cultural forces, the literature has responded quickly to such pressures. African American literature consists of the literary work by the writers of Afro-origin settled in USA. The category“ slave narratives” were writings by people who had experienced slavery. It described their journeys to independence and their survival struggles. The concepts explored and issues raised were racism, slavery, and social equality.

The Trope of the Papers: Rethinking the (Un)Documented in African American Literature

MELUS ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-125
Author(s):  
Esmeralda Arrizón-Palomera
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Harriet Jacobs ◽  
Undocumented Immigrant ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Sojourner Truth

Abstract I argue for a reconceptualization of undocumentedness, the experience of being undocumented, from an experience that is simply a result of the modern immigration regime to an experience that is a result of interlocking systems of oppression and resistance to them that has shaped Blackness and the vision for black liberation. I make this argument by defining and tracing the trope of the papers—the use of legal and extralegal documents to examine and document African Americans’ and other people of African descent’s relationship to the nation-state—in the slave narrative and the neo-slave narrative. I offer a close readings of slave narratives, including Sojourner Truth’s The Narrative of Sojourner Truth (1850) and Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, and neo-slave narratives, including Toni Morrison’s A Mercy (2008) and Gayl Jones’s Mosquito (1999), to illustrate the significance of the undocumented immigrant in African American literature and demonstrate that writers of African American literature have been thinking intensely about undocumentedness, although not in the way undocumentedness is typically understood.

scholarly journals Joe Brainard’s "I Remember", Fragmentary Life Writing and the Resistance to Narrative and Identity

Text Matters ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 223-236
Author(s):  
Wojciech Drąg
Keyword(s):  
Coming Out ◽  
Narrative Identity ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Roland Barthes ◽  
Life Narrative ◽  
Inherent Property ◽  
Single Person

Paul Ricoeur declares that “being-entangled in stories” is an inherent property of the human condition. He introduces the notion of narrative identity—a form of identity constructed on the basis of a self-constructed life-narrative, which becomes a source of meaning and self-understanding. This article wishes to present chosen instances of life writing whose subjects resist yielding a life-story and reject the notions of narrative and identity. In line with Adam Phillips’s remarks regarding Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1975), such works—which I refer to as fragmentary life writing—emerge out of a profound scepticism about any form of “fixing” oneself and confining the variety and randomness of experience to one of the available autobiographical plots. The primary example of the genre is Joe Brainard’s I Remember (1975)—an inventory of approximately 1,500 memories conveyed in the form of radically short passages beginning with the words “I remember.” Despite the qualified degree of unity provided by the fact that all the recollections come from the consciousness of a single person, the book does not arrange its content in any discernible order—chronological or thematic; instead, the reader is confronted with a life-in-fragments. Although individual passages could be part of a coming-of-age, a coming-out or a portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man narrative, Brainard is careful not to let any of them consolidate. An attempt at defining the characteristics of the proposed genre will be followed by an indication of more recent examples of fragmentary life writing and a reflection on its prospects for development

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