In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Biography 23.3 (2000) 568-572



[Access article in PDF]
Kenneth Mostern. Autobiography and Black Identity Politics: Racialization in Twentieth-Century America. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. 280 pp. ISBN 0-521-64114-4, $54.95 cloth; ISBN 0-521-64679-0, $19.95 paper.

If, as Eric Lott suggests, the emptying out of meaning of the term "identity politics" represents a New Orthodoxy amongst cultural critics both inside and outside the academy, then Kenneth Mostern's Autobiography and Black Identity Politics: Racialization in Twentieth-Century America is essential reading as a means of reinscribing the term with sociopolitical significance. The primary aim of Mostern's conceptualization of autobiography generally, and African American autobiographies specifically, is to defend identity politics from critics (Mostern cites Micaela di Leonardo specifically) who simply take the term as "innately a term of opprobrium." Mostern explains that such a priori conceptualizations of identity politics have "for historical reasons, become exceptionally simple to attack" (5). Instead, Mostern's notion of identity politics takes into consideration the layers of complexity associated with the term by beginning its analysis with an examination of black women in the U.S. and women of color more broadly through a reading of June Jordan's work, which he reads as an "example of a particularly elegant contemporary humanism." The intersection between color and gender which black women/women of color represents is crucial to Mostern's central argument that supports identity politics [End Page 568] as the primary determinant of a racialized form of sociopolitical action. In Mostern's view, the very existence of the category "woman of color" is significant: "that something as biologically insignificant as skin color has, in becoming raced, maintained such a role is precisely what should provide the impetus for an inquiry into the historical interrelations between the socioeconomic and psychological meaning of identity as it structures and determines politics" (6-7).

Autobiography thus becomes the determining structure of identity politics, since it exemplifies "that process which articulates the determined subject so as to actively produce a newly positive identity" (11). Chapter two, which Mostern unfortunately insists is "optional reading for those not interested in Autobiography Studies as such," provides the most innovative contribution to ways of thinking through the problematics which constitute the study of autobiography. Mostern posits a series of intersections between the African American literary tradition of autobiography and the theoretical discourse on autobiography that elides issues of race, class, and gender. Here Mostern does the important work of bringing recent theoretical insights in autobiography studies, namely those offered by Philip Lejeune and Paul de Man, to broaden the parameters and scope of African American autobiography. At the same time, Mostern's decidedly "raced" approach provides these theories with the necessary context and ground that increase their relevance and practical value. Mostern's attempts to bring divergent streams of ethnic, queer, and women's autobiography into conversation is pedagogically astute, enabling the student of autobiography to come to terms with the multiple perspectives and positionalities implicit in the writing of one's life story. However, Mostern's turn to an exclusive reading of black autobiography at the conclusion of this chapter to some degree undermines the intersections he posits.

Mostern finally asserts that his theory of autobiography, one that he has spent over twenty pages discussing and sketching--he includes useful diagrams--is, in fact, what "has always been implicitly known by writers on African American autobiography" (51). In other words, Mostern's theory of autobiography is not a theory at all, but an articulation--in highly sophisticated theoretical language--of African American autobiographical writings, wherein the subject must negotiate between its experience as a singular "I" and as a member of a collectivized "we." Mostern's contribution to the field, then, is not in terms of a new concept or formulation, but rather in his "positioning" of African American autobiography as the articulation of a particular racial identity formation according to the historical context of its writing. Mostern's position thus counters Stephen Butterfield's 1974 [End Page 569] study Black Autobiography in America, which characterizes the...

pdf