African Diaspora and Autobiographics: Skeins of Self and Skin (review)

Since the new millennium has naively been designated the age of the memoir, one wonders what the age of the slave narratives or the innumerable autobiographical texts that predate the twentieth century and its now fashionable cultural cum global "turn" should be called. Perhaps the age of amnesia. The postmodern and poststructural exigencies have made way for varying theoretical mythologies so that the aesthetics of self-representation and the validity of memory have been stripped of relevance and meaning. In a reverse construction, Chinosole's African Diaspora and Autobiographics sets out to theorize on the autobiographical genre through practical criticism. Drawing on both contextual and semantical parallels in the carefully selected texts in order to affirm a continuity in liberational black intellectual tradition in Africa as well as in the Diaspora, Chinosole recuperates fragmented selves while interrogating and providing refreshing insights into the discourse of self-reflexivity. Updating such pioneering efforts as James Olney's Tell Me, Africa and Robert Stepto's From behind the Veil, this timely book offers a comparative perspective of black autobiographical writing from Africa and the African Diaspora. Beyond this innovative approach, Chinosole even goes a step further by drawing a gender balance between her choice of texts and activist writers. Of the nine authors examined, five are male, while the remaining four are female. In essence, Chinosole bridges the gap in scholarship as well as the artificial division between African and African diasporic experiences.

For any student of black autobiographies, Chinosole's sensitive and provocative reading is as startling as her penchant for controversies is informative. The revelations that Richard Wright's Black Boy is both "individual" and "collective" in perspective while Peter Abrahams's Tell Freedom not only draws inspiration from Black Boy but contains parallel descriptions of experiences make the case that the African world has so much in common in spite of living on the different sides of the Atlantic. The quest for literacy and freedom, self-knowledge and self-reflexivity, which runs through the analyzed texts, is a strategy for protest and subversion—indeed, a "counterhegemonic" measure against oppression and domination. The discussion of The Life of Olaudah Equiano as an ambivalent text in its narrative posture sets the tone for more discursive complexities that the autobiographical genre presents. Through humor, Equiano creates multiple selves: one that ridicules Western hypocris, on the one hand, and celebrates Western education and its privileges, on the other. The question for the reader is: how does this duality affect self-representation, authenticity, and credibility? In her subsequent discussion of Richard Wright, Peter Abrahams, Agostinho Neto, and George Lamming, Chinosole seems to seek resolution to these autobiographical "contradictions" by privileging ideology over aesthetics while making a case for group/communal solidarity even when a given text appears to be individualistic or even "uncommitted."

Just like the black male autobiographies, their female counterparts are even more compelling. As the author points out in her preface, the first half of the book is organized around "Pan-African literary exchanges of the 1950s and 1960s" (xi), while the second half is structured around what she calls "gender-sensitive discourse which is distinctly womanist" (xii). The author's discussion of works by Harriet Jacobs, Assata Shakur, Evelyn Williams, and Audre Lorde betrays her activist penchant. In one of her moments of self-revelation, the author defines her focus on matrilineal diaspora as "the capacity to survive and aspire, to be contrary and self-affirming across continents and generations" (135). Indeed, what these female authors have in common goes beyond their varying intellectual and human "capacities," to the political necessity to rise up to challenging and oppressive situations, turning the negatives into positives through creative tensions, antagonisms and oppositionalities.

The narratives of Harriet Jacobs and Assata Shakur are heart-wrenching. The comparative approach indicates that the female body is still "hunted," whether during...