From the 19th-century articulations of Sojourner Truth to such contemporary thinkers as Patricia J. Williams, black feminists have always recognized the mutual dependence of race and gender. In this text, Valerie Smith explores the myriad ways race and gender shape lives and social practices. Smith identifies black feminist theorizing as a strategy of reading rather than as something located in a particular subjective experience. Her intent is not to deny the validity of black women's lived experience, but rather to resist deploying a uniform model of black women's lives. Whether reading race...
From the 19th-century articulations of Sojourner Truth to such contemporary thinkers as Patricia J. Williams, black feminists have always recognized t...
It is by telling the stories of their lives that black writers--from the authors of nineteenth-century slave narratives to contemporary novelists--affirm and legitimize their psychological autonomy. So Valerie Smith argues in this perceptive exploration of the relationship between autobiography and fiction in Afro-American writing. Smith sees the processes of plot construction and characterization as providing these narrators with a measure of authority unknown in their lives. Focusing on autobiographies by Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs and the fiction of James...
It is by telling the stories of their lives that black writers--from the authors of nineteenth-century slave narratives to contemporary novelists--...
Not only one of the last of over one hundred slave narratives published separately before the Civil War, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) is also one of the few existing narratives written by a woman. It offers a unique perspective on the complex plight of the black woman as slave and as writer. In a story that merges the conventions of the slave narrative with the techniques of the sentimental novel, Harriet Jacobs describes her efforts to fight off the advances of her master, her eventual liaison with another white man (the father of two of her children), and her...
Not only one of the last of over one hundred slave narratives published separately before the Civil War, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
