New Media in Black Women’s Autobiography

In New Media in Black Women’s Autobiography: Intrepid Embodiment and Narrative Innovation, Tracy Curtis suggests that “technological advances and educational declines” (2) in the 1980s and 1990s reinvigorated old stereotypes of black womanhood. This context motivates Curtis’s exploration of the ways in which black women create counter narratives to mainstream discourse in a shifting technological landscape. Through this framework, the author pays sustained attention to black women’s insistence on embodiment within autobiographical narratives in the era of new media, arguing that innovative, nuanced images of black women appeared not primarily in literary fiction, but in autobiography. Curtis, whose work focuses on recent African American women’s autobiographical expression, importantly notes that black women’s autobiography, in dialogue with popular media representations of (black) womanhood, shapes national discourse in the United States by employing first-person narratives as a means of critically dismantling mainstream assumptions about black women’s subjectivity. New Media in Black Women’s Autobiography fittingly begins with a chapter on Audre Lorde, who, according to Curtis, combined public and intimate details of her life to create “work that has had a lasting impact on generations of writers” (16). Curtis carefully examines drafts of Lorde’s biomythography, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982), and memoir, The Cancer Journals (1997), to provide some of the book’s most compelling material. This archival material enlivens the chapter’s analysis of the narrativizing processes Lorde undertook to emphasize embodiment as a strategy to write against a mind/body split that “forestalls healing, wholeness, and health by constraining the imagination to such a degree that people consistently artificially bifurcate themselves” (19)

Aesthetics · Art · Biography · Context (archaeology · Literature · Mainstream · Memoir · Narrative · Sociology · Subjectivity · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies · Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis · Rhetoric and Communication Studies · Gender Studies · History · Philosophy

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