Autobiography as Activism: Three Black Women of the Sixties (review)

To counter the stereotypes and mystery that cloud our understanding of the 1960s, Margo Perkins offers her reading of three understudied (pun intended) autobiographies: Assata Shakur's Assata (1987), Angela Davis's An Autobiography (1974), and Elaine Brown's A Taste of Power (1992). Engrossing and engaging, Autobiography as Activism is just what one would expect from the recipient of the Women's Eudora Welty Prize (1999). Perkins argues that because of their activist, and therefore political, perspectives, these women's autobiographies have received insufficient critical attention.

While Perkins is heavily invested in the autobiographical form and the ways its reception and structure—particularly as developed by these three African American women—challenge debates about the relationship between critical practice and critical theory, her foray into these debates is not very convincing. Defining theory as "an act of translation ostensibly motivated by the will to make meaning" (24), Perkins asserts that the three autobiographies she examines "suggest new ways of envisioning literary study . . . not just as a repository of culture, but also as a pedagogical resource in the work of transforming culture" (25). That political autobiographies engage culture by transforming it is not necessarily a new idea; however, Perkins does strike upon an original aspect of the problem with theory—its relentless and therefore hegemonic representation of the material world. Perkins's problem with theory is its inflexibility—its reference to itself only (witness the narrow scope of reference in any collection of footnotes)—and its marginalization of other kinds of experience both within and without its tightly drawn confines. Many critics have drawn an analogy between the psychosocial conditions of slavery and the conditions of African American subjects in the post–1960s era. Perkins returns to this analogy throughout Autobiography as Activism, reminding readers that the incarceration of African Americans is one of the most consistent expressions of our troubled past: "African American communities continue to be victimized by colonial domination and exploitation, state repression, and systematic racism, albeit in different forms" (40). Joining other critics (Angela Davis and Beth Richie, to name only two), Perkins argues that the prison industrial complex is another form of slavery.

Perkins appears to subvert her own claim about the authority of autobiography when she explores the fictionalizing, narrative-producing elements in the texts in question. In fact, her description of the creative license writers tend to use when recounting childhood events and adolescent experiences emphasizes these elements. If fact becomes fiction in order to be legible to others, then isn't all autobiography, even political autobiography, implicated in this (sub)conscious mess? Indeed. While Perkins often argues for a renegotiation of what it means to recognize or to tell the truth, it is often difficult to ascertain whether the transformation of the historical record implied by autobiography occurs through use of the truth or through an understanding of the imaginary. Some of these issues are further complicated when Perkins describes how these activist women had to move outside their biological families and break away from their mothers to garner personal and political support, a move represented as necessary to the development of public, political identities. Perkins seems to be arguing for a reassessment of the use value of the biological family, yet at times she appears to retreat from the minefield of biology, family, and motherhood that the narratives seem to present. In examining Brown's "silences around motherhood," Perkins contends that "readers who are conscious of their own reactions, for instance, may find cause to evaluate their own values and assumptions about women as mothers" (107). Many feminist readers will acknowledge this ambivalence, and Perkins should be given credit for moving into very difficult terrain. Issues of biology, family, and motherhood—deeply connected with race, sex, and gender—are still traversed too rarely.

Perkins needn't resolve, perhaps, this...