Date of Award
1994
Document Type
Senior Scholars Paper (Open Access)
Department
Colby College. Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program
Advisor(s)
Bryant, Cedric Gael
Abstract
"A theory in the flesh": the Art-full Politics of African-American Women's Autobiographies is a kind of amalgam of philosophy and literary criticism. Through the autobiographies of Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, Maya Angelou, and Itabari Njeri and the theoretical discourse of insurgent black intellectuals Cornel West and bell hooks, I interrogate the intersection of philosophical discourse and literature, art and theory. My project is an attempt to show that African-American women autobiographers, situated in a contemporary condition of racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia, engage in, with their work, a highly contextualized, profoundly historicized personal and political dialogic discourse. Battling the racism, sexism, classism, and heterosexism of the white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy black women combat the imposition of external self-definitions, self-division, and self erasure.
Keywords
African American women authors, Autobiography -- Women authors
Recommended Citation
Maclean, Betsy, ""A Theory in the Flesh": The Art-full Politics of African-American Women'sAutobiographies" (1994). Senior Scholar Papers. Paper 161.https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/seniorscholars/161
Copyright
Colby College theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed or downloaded from this site for the purposes of research and scholarship. Reproduction or distribution for commercial purposes is prohibited without written permission of the author.