The Invisibility of 19th Century African American (Auto)biographies

Abstract

This paper aims at investigating how slavery experiences of African Americans have been disregarded as traumatic, leading to the marginalized position their (auto)biographical works have had in the academic field. Drawing from the concepts of memory and identity, the analysis here proposed will examine how African American literary invisibility can be understood within academic discourse concerning the difference between (auto)biography and slave narratives as classificatory terms. Henceforth it will be possible to advocate for a visible space of African American (auto)biographies in the literary canon culminating in the production of neo-slave narratives in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, which have enriched studies of collective memory and identity.