| My dissertation, titled "Media, Manipulation, and Self-fashioning: Black Women's Autobiography and Public Perception," investigates the role of the mass media in shaping the narratives of black women activist autobiographies during the tumultuous period of Black Power, roughly between 1965-1975. Throughout my project I examine how activists like Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, and Elaine Brown utilize the autobiographical form to not only record their experiences for future generations, but as a way to dispute the powerfully universalizing tendencies of the media in rendering each individual woman's life experience. My research utilizes primary evidence from the period--newspapers, magazines, book reviews, and editorials, as well as research on the media (surveys, sociological studies) conducted during this period, in an attempt to capture how the public reacted to the type of stories written about these women and in turn, how each writer framed her autobiography in response to this existing conversation between the media and its public audience. In each case, a distinct conversation exists between the media and the autobiographer, forming a unique discourse that illuminates the complexity of racial and gender relations of the time and adding a fundamental layer to our existing histories of the role of women during the civil rights and black power eras. |
