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

76 страница из 129

Trethewey, like Jerry Ward, is a college professor. She holds a distinguished professorship at Emory University. Their narratives focus specifically on Hurricane Katrina, but they are nonetheless in a long line of African American life narrators who hold appointments in American universities. These narratives generally showcase an up-by-the-bootstraps trajectory of persons from impoverished communities who manage, against the odds, to acquire not only college degrees but who succeed in higher education. There is a plethora of manifestations of this category, including Louis Gates, Jr.’s Colored People (1994), Karla F. C. Holloway’s Codes of Conduct: Race, Ethics, and the Color of Our Character (1995) as well as her BookMarks: Reading in Black and White: A Memoir (2006), Deborah McDowell’s Leaving Pipe Shop: Memories of Kin (1996), and Horace A. Porter’s The Making of a Black Scholar: From Georgia to the Ivy League (2003). With the publication of my Summer Snow: Reflections from a Black Daughter of the South in 2003, I joined those academic narrators. Here, I reflect upon Summer Snow to comment on my composition of the narrative as well as various reactions to it. I am fortunate that the volume has been taught in a variety of classroom settings, including ones at Southern Illinois University, the University of Delaware, the University of Kansas, and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.