1st Edition

Memoirs of Race, Color, and Belonging

By Nicole Stamant Copyright 2022
192 Pages
by Routledge

192 Pages
by Routledge

192 Pages
by Routledge

Memoirs of Race, Color, and Belonging provides a fresh look at the complex dialogue of race and identity in memoir, examining three generations of biracial African Americans’ experiences in their autobiographies. Exploring writers from James McBride and Shirlee Taylor Haizlip to Barack Obama, Toi Dericotte, Natasha Trethway, Rebecca Walker, and Emily Raboteau, this volume explores the ways in... Read more

Introduction: Relationality, Identification, and the One-Drop Rule

Hospitality, Inheritance, and Collective Memory

Organization

Chapter 1: Haunting and "The new America": Living with Jim Crow

Passing: Spectral Temporality & Surveillance

"home in language": Proprioceptive Subjectivity

Chapter 2: Memorials and Filiality in the Civil Rights Era

"The words to tell the story": Driven to Memorialize

Still Haunted: Postmemory and Place-Memory

Chapter 3: Movement Children: The Post-Soul Generation

"Belonging is my birthright": Being Post-Soul

The Paradox of Hospitality

Conclusion: Considering Genetic Identity

Coda

Bibliography

Biography

Nicole Stamant, author of Serial Memoir: Archiving American Lives (Palgrave, 2014), is Associate Professor and Chair of English at Agnes Scott College, where she specializes in Life Writing Studies. She earned her PhD in English from Texas A&M University and her articles have appeared in ARIEL, MELUS, a/b: Auto/Biography, South Central Review, and Studies in Comics among others. She has contributed to a number of edited collections; most recently Consumption and the Literary Cookbook (Routledge 2020). In 2018, she received the Agnes Scott Vulcan Materials Company Teaching Excellence Award.