Texas, for years, was a one-party state controlled by white democrats. In 1962, a young eighteen-year-old heard the first rumblings of Chicano community organization in the barrios of Cristal. The rumor in the town was that five Mexican Americans were going to run for all five seats on the city council. But first, poor citizens had to find a way to pay the $1.75 poll tax. Money had to be raised-through bake sales of tamales, cake walks, and dances. So began the political activism of Jose Angel Gutierrez. Gutierrez's autobiography, The Making of a Chicano Militant, is the first...
Texas, for years, was a one-party state controlled by white democrats. In 1962, a young eighteen-year-old heard the first rumblings of Chicano com...
Dictated in an idiomatic, associative style, this book exposes the doubleness of Carson McCullers's life. A mine of information for anyone interested in McCullers and American literary life in the 1950s, these memoirs are also a testament to the courage and love of life of their author.
Dictated in an idiomatic, associative style, this book exposes the doubleness of Carson McCullers's life. A mine of information for anyone interested ...
Born on a Kentucky plantation in 1815, Bibb first attempted to escape from bondage at the age of ten. He was recaptured and escaped several more times before he eventually settled in Detroit and joined the antislavery movement as a lecturer. This autobiography was first published in 1849.
Born on a Kentucky plantation in 1815, Bibb first attempted to escape from bondage at the age of ten. He was recaptured and escaped several more times...
Since the late 1960s, American film and video makers of all stripes have been fascinated with themes of self and identity. Though the documentary form is most often used to capture the lives of others, Jim Lane turns his lens on those media makers who document their own lives, their own identities. He looks at the ways in which autobiographical documentaries - Roger and Me, Sherman's March, and Silverlake Life are but a few of the more prominent examples - raise weighty questions about American cultural life. What is the role of women in society? What does it mean to die from AIDS? How do...
Since the late 1960s, American film and video makers of all stripes have been fascinated with themes of self and identity. Though the documentary form...
Despite the range and abundance of autobiographical writing from the Anglophone Caribbean, this book is the first to explore this literature fully. It covers works from the colonial era up to present-day AIDS memoirs and assesses the links between more familiar works by George Lamming, C. L. R. James, Derek Walcott, V. S. Naipaul, and Jamaica Kincaid and less frequently cited works by the Hart sisters, Mary Prince, Mary Seacole, Claude McKay, Yseult Bridges, Jean Rhys, Anna Mahase, and Kamau Brathwaite. Sandra Pouchet Paquet charts the intersection of multiple, contradictory viewpoints of the...
Despite the range and abundance of autobiographical writing from the Anglophone Caribbean, this book is the first to explore this literature fully. It...
Jean M. Humez offers a biographical overview based on extensive new research and a compilation of the complete texts of the stories Harriet Tubman told about her life - a virtual autobiography culled by Humez from rare early publications and manuscript sources.
Jean M. Humez offers a biographical overview based on extensive new research and a compilation of the complete texts of the stories Harriet Tubman tol...
A Cuban woman who moved to New Orleans in the 1850s and eloped with her American lover, Loreta Janeta Velazquez fought in the Civil War for the Confederacy as the cross-dressing Harry T. Buford. As Buford, she single-handedly organized an Arkansas regiment; participated in the historic battles of Bull Run, Balls Bluff, Fort Donelson, and Shiloh; romanced men and women; and eventually decided that spying as a woman better suited her Confederate cause than fighting as a man. In the North, she posed as a double agent and worked to traffic information, drugs, and counterfeit bills to support the...
A Cuban woman who moved to New Orleans in the 1850s and eloped with her American lover, Loreta Janeta Velazquez fought in the Civil War for the Confed...
A search for roots and identity has rarely been captured with such irony, unusual insight, and surprising humor as in this memoir of heartbreak and hope. Today a distinguished American poet, Colette Inez first came to the United States when she was eight years old, as an apparent Belgian orphan escorted by two complete strangers. Growing up in post-World War II America, a stranger to her own past, she survived a harrowing adolescence and an increasingly menacing, abusive adoptive family by learning to define her single solace: a developing passion for literature. Facing possible deportation...
A search for roots and identity has rarely been captured with such irony, unusual insight, and surprising humor as in this memoir of heartbreak and ho...
Philip Holden reveals deeply gendered connections between the writing of individual lives and of the narratives of nations emerging from colonialism. Autobiography and Decolonization is the first book to give serious academic attention to autobiographies of nationalist leaders in the process of decolonization, attending to them not simply as partial historical documents, but as texts involved in remaking the world views of their readers. Holden examines Mohandas K. Gandhi s An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Marcus Garvey s fragmentary...
Philip Holden reveals deeply gendered connections between the writing of individual lives and of the narratives of nations emerging from colonialism. ...
In the period between the 1920s and 1940s, a genre emerged in Chinese literature that would reveal crucial contradictions in Chinese culture that still exist today. At a time of intense political conflict, Chinese women began to write autobiography, a genre that focused on personal identity and self-exploration rather than the national, collective identity that the country was championing."When "I" Was Born: Women's Autobiography in Modern China" reclaims the voices of these particular writers, voices that have been misinterpreted and overlooked for decades. Tracing women writers as they move...
In the period between the 1920s and 1940s, a genre emerged in Chinese literature that would reveal crucial contradictions in Chinese culture that stil...