Contending discourses of black autobiography: respectability, authenticity, and masculinity

After historicizing the politics of racial representation in slave narrative, this article considers how race, gender, and class intersect historically autobiographical production Black men United States. At dawn Jim Crow era, autobiography conformed to a cultural synecdoche, which avowed that progress depended on respectability esteemed individuals. Dominated by aspirational figures who presented themselves as emblems, became closely aligned with imperatives middle-class formation, actuating discrete form publicity erected disciplinary boundaries around self-presentation silenced disreputable figures. With emergence criminal sexual self-reference, whether subtle or striking, narratives men, autobiographers like boxer Jack Johnson, scholar J. Saunders Redding, writer Claude Brown, disrupted class-bound constraints had determined production, staging an internecine struggle over terms representation—that is, between contending discourses authenticity