Writing Another Life: The Constructedness of the Autobiographical Genre

Abstract

In this concluding chapter, I examine the peculiarity of the autobiographical genre, especially in relation to the possibility of conflating facts with fiction. I also summarize the continuities and divergences that this study reveals. The privileges that Black autobiographers enjoy as cultural representatives allow them to foreground the importance of their communities and chronicle their acts of resistance, two of the major continuities in the texts studied. The importance of Blackness, education, naming, and history also recur in the autobiographies. The texts, however, differ in terms of language, religion, location, Africa, gender, and the primary occupation of the writers.