New Media in Black Women’s Autobiography

Description

With the rapid expansion of the field of autobiography due to the emergence of new digital media, black American women have excelled at expanding the genre’s boundaries as they address disparaging depictions of themselves. Examining novelists, bloggers, and other creators of new media, this study focuses on autobiographies by American black women since 1980, including Audre Lorde, Jill Nelson, and Janet Jackson. New Media in Black Women’s Autobiography considers how black women adopt new media forms to assert their place as the rightful creators of their own image. Using 1980 as a starting point, Tracy Curtis explores how black women’s insistence on writing embodiment into their narratives addresses and supplants images deployed against them.