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

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Part 1 “Subversive (Re)creations of the Self—Past and Present” centers on African American life-writing and investigates the political motives of black authors, most of whom often used subversive strategies to construct their selves and dismantle the foundations of a racist southern society. In the opening essay of this collection, Trudier Harris examines the different and fluctuating autobiographical impulses that have moved African American southern writers,ssss1 including herself as the author of a memoir. Early life narrators like Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs and Booker T. Washington clearly had a political purpose and were more committed to community than to literary self-creation. For Harris, the tradition of what she calls “individualistic life narration” [her emphasis] starts in the 1920s and 1930s, with Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, and is further confirmed in the autobiographical works by Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston, though they constitute an “exception.” Life narrators like Alice Walker and Anne Moody, who penned their stories during the Civil Rights era, clearly had a social consciousness, wanted to change the South, and embraced activism in their lives and life-writing. Maya Angelou’s classic memoir, however, written in 1970, is “less activist-oriented” and more focused on the individual. Although region and landscape are important for southern life-writing, other factors like Hurricane Katrina have defined the life narratives of several African Americans like Natasha Trethewey, who uses what Harris calls “self-erasure” to highlight the destructive effect of the disaster on people’s lives. With her memoir, entitled Summer Snow: Reflections from a Black Daughter of the South (2003), Trudier Harris herself joins a long line of academic life narratives written by African Americans since the 1990s. Scholarly in her approach yet deeply personal when discussing her own life-writing process, Harris ultimately finds a sense of connectedness with the autobiographical urge of those who preceded her.