| International in scope, this study delineates the textual self depicted in five autobiographical works: from England, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789); from the United States, Black Boy (1945) by Richard Wright and Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982) by Audre Lorde; from South Africa, Tell Freedom (1954) by Peter Abrahams; and from Angola, Sagrada Esperanca (1963) by Agostinho Neto. As an expression of the African diaspora, Black autobiographical writing is a diasporic literary mode connecting Black literatures worldwide.;The thesis expands on the DuBoisian concept of double-consciousness as it unfolds in the textual self depicted in each of these works. The "two warring souls" (African and Western) described by W. E. B. DuBois in The Souls of Black Folk appear in the textual self as bifurcated and conflicted in most of these writings, but they may also be multiple and celebrated as in the case of Lorde's Zami. Through close textual analysis, I explore variations in the depiction of the textual self through voice, narrative posture, and structure.;In addition to analyzing the individual textual self of the persona, I treat the portrayal of Blacks as a group, the collective textual self. Because these autobiographical writers choose to speak on behalf of Blacks generally, not only does the persona represent the community, but also through customs, struggles, and aspirations, the community is depicted as a collective textual self for a predominantly white audience. The necessity of using a form that best accommodates individual portrayals as Western autobiography does, while fashioning it to serve a collective portrayal, create structural and thematic tensions in Black autobiographical writing. In each case the persona is more Americanized or Europeanized than the community represented, and this poses a paradox for literary study.;Through close textual analysis, this study is a first step to future theoretical analysis in comparative Black literature of the autobiographical mode as a diasporic literary form. |
