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

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In recent times, some noted historians have found in southern autobiography a fertile ground to explore the region’s identity and history. Jennifer Ritterhouse’s fascinating study Growing Up Jim Crow (2006) uses memoirs to show what she calls “the ‘etiquette’ of race relations” in the segregated South and how black and white children gradually learned its secret codes and “the racial roles they were expected to play” (2). In Closer to Truth Than Any Fact: Memoir, Memory, and Jim Crow (2008), Jennifer Jensen Wallach claims that “[t]here are certain aspects of historical reality that can best be captured by artfully wrought literary memoirs. Skillful autobiographers are uniquely equipped to describe the entire universe as it appeared from an acknowledged perspective” (4). Wallach uses the memoirs of Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Willie Morris, Lillian Smith, and William Alexander Percy as valuable sources to understand the history of the South during the Jim Crow era. The same intersection of history and literature is what can be found in John C. Inscoe’s volume Writing the South Through the Self: Explorations in Southern Autobiography (2011). Inscoe expresses his “firm belief that autobiography and memoir are history at its most humanistic” (15). This book, which evolved from a course Inscoe taught for a number of years, as he explains in the Preface, has some unique qualities worth pointing out. This is the first book-length study that includes a whole chapter on Appalachian autobiography by both men and women. Equally important is the inclusion of a final Coda in which Inscoe provides an interesting overview of autobiographies by Native Americans—mostly Cherokee/Appalachians—Asians, and Latinos. Among them one can find Marilou Awiakta, Lisa Alther, Koji Ariyoshi and Judith Ortiz Cofer, to name a few. Inscoe’s volume obviously includes discussions of other more classic autobiographies—William Styron, Erskine Caldwell, Lillian Smith, Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, for instance. But the final sections of the book—with their rich variety of life stories—show the reality of a multicultural and multiethnic South that has already moved beyond the traditional black and white binary.