Reading African American Autobiography: Twenty-First-Century

Contexts and Criticism ed. by Eric D. Lamore (review)

Roland Leander Williams Jr.

Biography, Volume 41, Number 2, Spring 2018, pp. 435-438 (Review)

Published by University of Hawai'i Press

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Reviews 435

scholarship on them: Justin Green’s Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary;

Robert Crumb and Aline Kominsky-Crumb’s collaborations collected in

Drawn Together; Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor; Keiji Nakazawa’s Barefoot

Gen; Art Spiegelman’s Maus; Phoebe Gloeckner’s A Child’s Life and e Diary

of a Teenage Girl; Joe Matt, Chester Brown, and Seth (the “Toronto School”);

Lynda Barry’s One Hundred Demons; Craig ompson’s Blankets; Marjane Sa-

trapi’s Persepolis; and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. As much as the earlier chap-

ters point to other works, and indeed Kunka himself critiques some of the

canonizing tendencies of comics studies, this “Key Texts” section installs the

US underground and indie comix of the 1960s as the origins of today’s auto/

bio comics and situates contemporary cartoonists as inheritors of their legacy.

Readers hoping to go beyond this Americanized canon will need to comb the

rest of the book to gain a fuller picture of the ﬁeld.

At the end of chapter three, Kunka writes, “One of my goals with this

book is to provide readers with a wide variety of examples—from the usual

suspects to lesser-known but accessible web and self-published comics, as well

as a range of subjects and critical approaches” (80). As much as he cannot

avoid the centripetal force of US alternative comics history, Kunka pushes

against it as much as possible within the parameters of his task to write an au-

thoritative textbook. e endnotes, glossary, and extensive bibliography high-

light the author’s deep knowledge of the ﬁeld and are indispensable tools for

further scholarship. As a studying and teaching tool, Autobiographical Comics

is a superb introduction to the ﬁeld that achieves accessibility without dimin-

ishing scholarly rigor. Even if Kunka has neither the space nor the mandate

to dislodge the dominant US-centric narrative of auto/bio comics fully, he

opens up space for other scholars to pick up this work. Ultimately, Autobio-

graphical Comics is the best study guide available, and Kunka’s generosity of

scholarship and tone provides a robust platform for teaching and researching

graphic life narratives.

Candida Rifkind

Eric D. Lamore, editor. Reading African American Autobiography: Twenty-

First-Century Contexts and Criticism. U of Wisconsin P, 2017, 278 pp.

ISBN 978-0299309800, $74.95.

African Americans have had powerful life stories to tell since 1661 when they

were sentenced to slavery in a land sold on liberty. ey have produced a long

line of narratives recording their fortunes. Academic publishers have printed

reams of criticism on the genre, and the University of Wisconsin Press recent-

ly added Reading African American Autobiography to the list. Edited by Eric

436 Biography vol. 41, no. 2, Spring 2018

D. Lamore, the new book contains a collection of scholarly studies that take

fresh looks at the tradition of African American autobiographical expression

from the vantage point of the twenty-ﬁrst century.

e practice of telling Black life stories took root in the colonial era of US

national development, germinating works such as e Interesting Narrative of

the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789), which re-

counts how the author freed himself from slavery through the use of learning.

A host of life stories relating clever escapes from enslavement came out of the

antebellum era; the number includes Running a ousand Miles for Freedom;

Or, e Escape of William and Ellen Craft (1860) as well as Narrative of the

Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)

by Harriet Jacobs. In the wake of the slave system, through the time of Jim

Crow, the line of Black life stories extended from Behind the Scenes: Or, irty

Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House (1868) by Elizabeth Keckley

to Up from Slavery (1901) by Booker T. Washington and Black Boy (1945) by

Richard Wright, telling how the writers beat long odds through deft exercises

of ingenuity. Displays of resourcefulness that improve lots have distinguished

the genre of Black life stories produced in every era of African American his-

tory. e motif marks e Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) and I Know

Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) by Maya Angelou, besides Dreams from My

Father (2004) by Barack Obama.

Reading African American Autobiography pays an implicit tribute to each

of these oft-cited narratives, and a couple of the works receive special atten-

tion. First, in the essay “Olaudah Equiano in the United States,” Lamore in-

spects the 1829 abridgement of Equiano’s book by Abigail Mott. He resolves

that the particular edition, allied with other versions, gives cause to treat it as

an indicator of historical conditions. en, “Richard Wright’s Environments”

by Susan Scott Parrish calls into question scholarship that ascribes the world-

view behind Black Boy to theories of human development encountered by the

author in Chicago. Instead, Parrish ties the origins of the perspective shared in

Wright’s life story to impressions made by his upbringing in rural Mississippi.

Along with Lamore, Parrish presents a case that raises fresh issues for consid-

eration in relation to the production and reception of African American au-

tobiographical expression.

e greater part of Reading African American Autobiography covers an ar-

ray of forgotten or neglected Black life stories. Spreading knowledge of the

ample iterations of this genre is a great service performed by this collection

of essays. One explores e Life and Dying Speech of Arthur (1768), the con-

fession of a Black man charged with rape and condemned to death for the

oﬀense, treating the eighteenth-century narrative as a recollection of a fatal

Reviews 437

struggle to overcome oppression. Another study complicates the concept of

autobiography with a review of Samuel Delany’s graphic novel Bread & Wine

(1999) based on his personal history. e essay “Born into is Body” leaves

the future borders of Black life writing open with a study of stories akin

to Faith Adiele’s Meeting Faith: e Forest Journals of a Black Buddhist Nun

(2004). Subsequently, “From Blog to Books” renders the prospective media

of the practice provisional with references to Angela Nissel’s Mixed: My Life

in Black and White (2006). “Grafted Belongings” turns the identity of twenty-

ﬁrst-century Black life writers into a point of contention with a survey of Jiaya

John’s Black Baby White Hands (2002) about the life of an African American

adopted by white parents.

In the introduction, the editor credits Reading African American Autobi-

ography to a determination to assess Black life stories with criticism stamped

by the “age of Obama.” Joycelyn Moody’s work “Early Black Men’s Spiritual

Autobiography” makes a signiﬁcant contribution to the project using an ap-

plication of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s theory of “homosociality.” It conveys an

exceptional reading of neglected antebellum narratives like e Life, History,

and Unparalleled Suerings of John Jea, the African Preacher (1811). Anthony

Foy’s essay “e Visual Properties of Black Autobiography” stands to quicken

interest in visual literacy by how it weighs the social value of photographs in

the forgotten memoir of William Edwards, entitled Twenty-Five Years in the

Black Belt (1918). e analyses of Foy and Moody oﬀer a measure of devel-

opments in African American literary criticism, and they aﬃrm the tendency

of African American autobiography to feature displays of resourcefulness em-

ployed to preserve dignity.

An oversight of this motif that marks Black life stories represents a short-

coming that diminishes the magnitude of most essays collected by Lamore.

e collection places an emphasis on the oppression that Blacks have en-

dured, but also sometimes obscures the genius with which African Americans

have overcome demeaning circumstances instigated by the establishment of

Black bondage. Nevertheless, the volume concludes with an article concern-

ing an autobiography that renders the use of ingenuity critical to the success

of a Black performer in Hollywood. Foxy: My Life in ree Acts (2010) is the

subject of the ﬁnal essay. Titled “Reading Signs of Crazy,” this text indicates

that Pam Grier, the pioneering star of blaxploitation action ﬁlms, made out

against long odds by keeping her wits about her with an eye to her advantage.

It strikes a chord that touches the heart of Black life stories.

Reading African American Autobiography is a very noteworthy addition to

the list of studies on African American autobiography. e book is the “age of

Obama” equivalent to African American Autobiography: A Collection of Critical

438 Biography vol. 41, no. 2, Spring 2018

Essays (1993) edited by William Andrews. It complements groundbreaking

publications on Black life stories. e text possesses an aﬃnity to Witnesses

for Freedom (1948) by Rebecca Chalmers Barton and Black Autobiography

in America (1974) by Stephen Butterﬁeld. It is connected likewise to Black

Women Writing Autobiography (1989) by Joanne Braxton, My Father’s Shadow

(1991) by David Dudley, and African American Autobiography and the Quest

for Freedom (2000) by this reviewer. Lamore has put together a book that en-

riches anew the study of Black life stories.

Roland Leander Williams, Jr.

Alan T. Levenson. Joseph: Portraits through the Ages. U of Nebraska P, 2016,

312 pp. ISBN 978-0827612501, $32.95.

e biblical story of Joseph, one of the gems of world literature, has been

the subject of long and fascinating scholarly inquiry. Rabbis and other Jew-

ish scholars have squeezed every letter and cantillation mark for interpretive

clues and signposts. Christian commentators, working from Greek and Latin

translations before the Renaissance and from Hebrew and modern languages

ever since, as well as Muslims, who know the story from its retelling in the

Qu’rān, have also contributed to this discussion, now in its third millennium.

Lastly, modern scholars of literature and the ancient Near East have not been

idle; books, commentaries, and articles on the Joseph story would ﬁll many

a shelf. is is an impressive body of work, one that can only be navigated

through years of patient language study, wide reading, and indefatigable in-

terest. Even the simplest survey of such a mass is beyond what most interested

readers of biblical literature could seriously contemplate. Fortunately, there is

now a guidebook that allows us a look at a few important paths through this

literary labyrinth.

Alan T. Levenson, chair in Judaic history and director of the Schusterman

Center for Judaic and Israel Studies at the University of Oklahoma, is the au-

thor of Joseph: Portraits through the Ages, almost too much of a good thing for

those interested in the history of biblical interpretation. e original Joseph

story, comprising most of the ﬁnal thirteen chapters of Genesis, has long been

recognized as a remarkable, weighty, and yet sometimes perplexing account of

Joseph’s trials and triumphs. He is no cardboard hero: the Hebrew account is

nuanced and beautifully told but also challenging, perhaps not always inten-

tionally so. e original author’s use of Biblical Hebrew, the terse, economi-

cal, literary dialect of ancient Israel, is both provocative and enticing, inviting

the reader to ponder each detail, a veritable feast for commentators.