Reading African American Autobiography: Twenty-First-Century Contexts and Criticism ed. by Eric D. Lamore

Abstract

Reviewed by: Reading African American Autobiography: Twenty-First-Century Contexts and Criticism ed. by Eric D. Lamore Daniel Stein Eric D. Lamore, ed. Reading African American Autobiography: Twenty-First-Century Contexts and Criticism. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2017. 296 pp. $74.95. The genre of autobiography, or life narrative, to use a more inclusive term, has perhaps been the most crucial mode of public self-fashioning for African Americans as well as one of the most effective means of documenting the humanity and essential Americanness of black folk from the moment the first Africans set foot on North American soil. As pioneering scholars like Rebecca Chalmers Barton, [End Page 315] Sidonie Smith, Stephen Butterfield, Frances Smith Foster, James Olney, Robert B. Stepto, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and William L. Andrews have argued, the very existence of life narratives by African Americans, especially when published in book form or presented as oral testimony, constitutes one of the most powerful arguments against reigning racist ideologies of black inferiority. In light of the centrality of the genre in African American literary and cultural history, it is not surprising that the emergence of African American Studies was fueled in part by an extended academic investment with the study of black autobiography. It is within this scholarly trajectory that recent essay collections in the path-breaking Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography series, edited by William L. Andrews, such as Angela A. Ards's Words of Witness: Black Women's Autobiography in the Post-"Brown" Era (2015) and Eric D. Lamore's Reading African American Autobiography: Twenty-First-Century Contexts and Criticism (2017) must be placed. Lamore's excellent volume combines a number of revised essays that originally appeared in a special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies in 2012 with additional pieces solicited for the present publication. As Lamore suggests in his introduction, the goal is to take stock of the current state of African American autobiography and expand the analysis beyond the canon and the printed word (3-4). The purpose of the book, he writes, is "to embrace newly recognized African American life writers from a wide range of historical periods, to widen the field's understanding of the myriad ways in which African Americans have engaged in examining the self, to analyze the more contemporary routes of dissemination that have been used to circulate autobiographical acts, [and] to trouble the 'texts' that have been traditionally housed in the canon of African American life narrative" (4). Recognizing the vastness of autobiographical materials, Lamore wisely foregoes any attempt at comprehensiveness and chooses a chronological order instead, beginning the volume with Lynn A. Casmier-Paz's close reading of one of the earliest existing examples of African American life narrative, The Life, and Dying Speech of Arthur, a Negro Man; Who Was Executed at Worcester, October 20, 1768. For a Rape Committed on the Body of One Deborah Metcalfe, and concluding with Kwakiutl L. Dreher's analysis of the feminist perspectives in actress Pam Grier's Foxy: My Life in Three Acts (2010). Lamore positions the book as "an 'age of Obama' assessment of African American life narrative" (10) in response to Robert B. Stepto's A Home Elsewhere: Reading African American Classics in the Age of Obama (2011). While this is an intriguing endeavor, it also marks the book as an assessment from what already seems to be a bygone era when a postracial society seemed to be at least a distant possibility for some. What's more, the book's potential to shake up established interpretations of the history and current state of African American autobiography remains largely confined to the individual chapters. Lamore gestures toward this potential when he speaks of the centrality of archival work for future investigations and encourages more "multilingual, transnational, and transatlantic" (11) perspectives on the genre, but it is ultimately left to the reader to draw larger conclusions (and there are several) from the book. Three thematic clusters inform the volume as a whole. First, all of the chapters acknowledge and investigate what Casmier-Paz calls "the limits and the possibilities of life writing" (19) for black Americans. If autobiography is understood as a textually or...