Author (Your Name)

Betsy Maclean, Colby College

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

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