Transgressive black female selfhood

By using textual examples from three autobiographies written by African American women in different periods of U.S. history, this paper argues that two distinct features mark black female autobiographical selfhood. One is its being a "selfhood-in-relation" that stands in stark opposition to "a lonely hero" subjects created by both black and white male American autobiographers. And the other is the political nature of African American autobiography as a genre which leads the authors to intense consideration of their reading public in the process of creating their autobiographical selves. The discussed texts include Harriet Jacobs's (or Linda Brent's) Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself (1861), Zora Neale Hurston's Dust Tracks on a Road (1942) and Angela Davis's Angela Davis: An Autobiography (1974).