Telling Our Stories Continuities and Divergences in Black Autobiographies [Hardcover]

Telling Our Stories investigates the continuities and divergences in selected Black autobiographies from Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States. The stories of slaves, creative writers, and political activists are discussed both as texts produced by individuals who are products of specific societies and as interconnected books. The book identifies influences of environmental and cultural differences on the texts while it adopts cross-cultural and postcolonial reading approaches to examine the continuities and divergences in them.Introduction: The Autobiographical Genre in Black Societies Theorizing Race, Theorizing Blackness Postcolonial Theory and Black Literatures Caliban, Is That You?: Slave Narratives and the Politics of Resistance Different, Yet Related: Black Creative Autobiographers in Dialogue Communal Resistance and Subjectivity: Black Activists in Racialized Societies Conclusion: Writing Another Life: The Constructedness of Autobiographical Genre

Black is the color of the autobiographies that Adetayo Alabi rereads in Telling Our Stories. Slaves, creative writers, and political activists, the self-conscious narrators in writing and through readers create communities and establish continuities - across both centuries and continents, from the African slave trade to the United States civil rights movement and the Caribbean 'lionhearted gal.' Alabi's radical reactivation of autobiography as a genre of resistance and mobilization is a compelling inquiry into a critical past and on behalf of an even more crucial promise. - Barbara Harlow, The University of Texas at Austin

Alabi's book is a long overdue and most welcome addition to the scholarly library on 'the African diaspora.' A major distinguishing mark of this field of study is the exploration of the links between regional segments of the Black world, in terms of continuities and divergences in their recognition of their common racial backgrounds and histories. Alabi makes tl­