New Media in Black Women's Autobiography - by T Curtis (Hardcover)

About the Book

" Using 1980 as a starting point, Curtis explores how black women's insistence on writing embodiment into their narratives addresses and supplants images deployed against them. She argues that although many stereotypes rely on the notion that black female identity comes only from and through the body, emphasis on corporeality serves these women well. Joining somatic experience with complicated inner lives compels at least understanding and perhaps empathy. Privileging their experiences as the only road to truths about their lives succeeds across formats. Deployed by black women, new media facilitate well-executed, defiant, creative autobiographical gestures that should be considered among the most effective and innovative in their respective milieus"--

Book Synopsis

Examining novelists, bloggers, and other creators of new media, this study focuses on autobiography by American black women since 1980, including Audre Lorde, Jill Nelson, and Janet Jackson. As Curtis argues, these women used embodiment as a strategy of drawing the audience into visceral identification with them and thus forestalling stereotypes.

About the Author

Tracy Curtis is Assistant Professor in the Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA.