Читать книгу Constructing the Self. Essays on Southern Life-Writing онлайн

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Jennifer Ritterhouse George Mason University

In Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century, historian Kevin Gaines observes that “a theme common to much African American autobiographical writing is the telling of the moment, usually during childhood, at which the author learns the drama of ‘social equality,’ or, as James Weldon Johnson put it, ‘the brutal impact of race and . . . how race prejudice permeate[s] the whole American social organism’” (47). Highly self-conscious, conventional, literary, sometimes lyric, black autobiographers’ dramas of “social equality” recount, in Gaines’s words, “the painful socialization of young African American males and females into a negrophobic, Victorian social order” (47), and they are inevitably shaped by the authors’ mature political views. In fact, scholars have been so aware of the extent to which black autobiography is shaped by its authors’ mature political views that they have often questioned the truthfulness of autobiographical narratives. The best-known case is Richard Wright’s Black Boy, which, as biographer Michel Fabre has shown, includes a number of fictional elements.