Cover -- Half-title -- Series-title -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Part one Theorizing race, autobiography, and identity politics -- 1 What is identity politics? Race and the autobiographical -- Identifying ''identity politics'' -- Identifying ''Black Autobiography'': determination, articulation, and the racial object -- June Jordan and black feminism: the construction of independence -- Racial space, cultural space -- The materiality of race-ness -- The terminology of race-ness -- Writing narrative about political practice -- 2 African-American autobiography and the field of autobiography Studies -- A schema for reading contemporary theories of autobiography -- The axis of referentiality -- The axis of subjectivity -- Some representative theoretical positions -- Lejeune/DeMan -- Eakin/Gunn/Lejeune (bis) -- Gusdorf/Stone/Heilbrun/Rampersad -- Sommer -- Gilmore/Lionnet/Smith -- Criticism of black autobiography -- Part two The politics of Negro self-representation -- 3 Three theories of the race of W. E. B. Du Bois -- Introduction -- The three theories -- Darkwater: The individualist theory of the veil and identity politics -- Dusk of Dawn: race and/as the autobiographical -- What is a race? -- How do you know a race when you see it? -- The Negro political subject in Dusk of Dawn -- Last words on the argument of Dusk of Dawn -- Autobiography: The communist theory and the end of identity politics -- Conclusion -- 4 The gender, race, and culture of anti-lynching politics in the Jim Crow era -- Middle class politics in the first half of the twentieth century -- Coloredness and whiteness in the autobiography of passing -- The foundations of anti-lynching politics: Ida B. Wells Barnett and Walter White -- Sexuality, gender, and the anti-lynching argument: Ida B. Wells Barnett and the NAACP -- Along This Way: Negro bildungsroman.

Reading Zora Neale Hurston's disavowal of race -- Obscuring white supremacy in the south -- Dehistoricizing the folk -- Class as culture, not poverty - let alone relation to the means of production -- ''Culture'' without ''race'' -- On the different roads to black feminist theory -- 5 Representing the Negro as proletarian -- Mediating black studies, the history of the Communist Party USA, and contemporary marxist theory: an outline of issues -- Writers as supporters and members of the CPUSA -- African-American subjectivity and Bolshevik theories -- Two ways of representing the Negro male-as-proletarian: Angelo Herndon and Paul Robeson -- Part three The dialectics of home: gender, nation, and blackness since the 1960s -- 6 Malcolm X and the grammar of redemption -- Introduction -- Narrative form and racial consciousness -- Four narratives of the content of racial consciousness -- Narrative 1: The hustle and the truth -- Narrative 2: Sexuality and purity -- Narrative 3: From color to nation -- Narrative 4: Of the training of black men -- 7 The political identity ''woman'' as emergent from the space of Black Power -- Black woman poet: subject -- Black woman philosopher: object -- Prison as structuring black experience - again -- The ''I'' as a series of events -- The self of international Communism -- Gender, emotion, and the narrative of George Jackson -- 8 Home and profession in black feminism -- Autobiography, home, and the critique of home -- Autobiographical practice in the work of bell hooks -- Leaving home for the academy -- Coda: notes toward the objectification of myself -- Notes -- 1 What is identity politics? Race and the autobiographical -- 2 African-American autobiography and the field of autobiography studies -- 3 Three theories of the race of W. E. B. Du Bois -- 4 The gender, race, and culture of anti-lynching politics in the Jim Crow era.

5 Representing the Negro as proletarian -- 6 Malcolm X and the grammar of redemption -- 7 The political identity ''woman'' as emergent from the space of Black Power -- 8 Home and profession in black feminism -- Works cited -- Index.