Affirmative acts: Political piety in African American women's contemporary autobiography

"Affirmative Acts: Political Piety in African American Women's Contemporary Autobiography" examines works written in the last decade of the twentieth-century in response to the rise of social conservatism stateside and imperialism abroad: Warriors Don't Cry by Melba Pattillo Beals of the Little Rock Nine; Unafraid of the Dark: A Memoir by journalist-cum-minister Rosemary Bray; and Soldier: A Poet's Childhood by poet, essayist, and activist June Jordan. Since its eighteenth-century beginnings, the African American autobiographical tradition has used life writing as a rhetorical platform for political commentary. The project thus situates these texts within this longstanding history as it examines the narrative strategies autobiographers embrace to revive a sense of political agency in an age of retrenchment.; Under the assumption that cultural memories are the means by which societies constitute and re-constitute themselves, "Affirmative Acts" tracks the myriad ways these authors invoke, then consciously invert, the classic narrative of the civil rights movement: its iconographic events and images, as well as the religious tropes of suffering and sacrifice in which it has been traditionally framed. The critical engagement not only broadens received understanding about the era's significance and scope but also prompts new ways of thinking about black history, identity, and agency. Indeed, these texts mark a pivotal juncture in the literary history of African American autobiography, as women writers re-imagine notions of community and power beyond the ideologies of manhood in which they are often inscribed.; The plethora of terms coined in recent years to describe black life at the turn of the twenty-first century---"post-civil rights," "post-soul," "the hip hop generation"---indicates a fragmented body politic unable to identify itself. In bringing their lived experience to bear on the project of crafting both a narrative and a politic that account for this historical moment, these autobiographers respond to calls for a spiritual, emotive language that might revitalize black civil society. Their recalibrations of the political lexicon make an array of contributions to modern political theory, from troubling traditional civil-rights discourse to theorizing the place of affective sensibilities such as love and mourning in the public sphere.