Sherrard Johnson’s chapter identifies some of the various aesthetic models and modes with which African Americans experimented in telling individual life stories during the New Negro movement, the Harlem Renaissance, and the interwar years. Sherrard Johnson argues that in migration and travel narratives and other autobiographical writings of the New Negro era, African American authors travel literally and figuratively; the power of these self-stories resides in an author’s interior reflection fused with external observations that both harness and resist the collective self.

The majority of slave narratives published between 1840 and 1865 were produced by persons who came from what might be termed the elite slave minority, that is, from skilled workers, domestic workers, and headmen. Men and women from the relatively higher echelons of slavery contributed double the number of texts to the mid-century slave narrative than were produced by former field laborers, those who spent most of their working life in slavery doing the most grueling and punishing agricultural labor. In this chapter, class refers mainly to two kinds of differences observable in antebellum slave narratives: differences based on access to and/or control of material resources, such as money, property, and compensation for labor; and differences based on access to or control of social power and prestige based on factors such as occupation, wage earning, family status, and literacy.

The first decade of the twentieth century introduced new voices into African American autobiography. The memoirs published as monographs enabled no assumptions about scope or content, or about literary aspirations or political agendas. Readers and publishers alike were introduced to a broad array of life writings prompted by many impulses. Booker T. Washington published two different works in 1901. An Autobiography: The Story of My Life and Work ran 455 pages and included 59 black and white images. Up from Slavery, Washington's shorter slave narrative, ran only 330 pages. Inspiring accounts of African American community engagement and collective aspirations, significantly more modest than Washington’s, were published that same year.The early twentieth century turn to the collective biography was a powerful rejection of self-made man mythologies long shaping white American autobiographical conventions. Life writing for and about the masses became a priority for magazine editor Pauline Hopkins and, by extension, for the Colored American Magazine. As her career revealed, Hopkins was dedicated to producing writing — including autobiography — that recuperated families and communities.

Moody’s introduction observes that works of African American autobiography predate even the oft-cited 1760 Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings, and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon, and the 1783 petition to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts filed by Belinda Royall (Sutton). Moody argues the genre of Black life writing has persistently appealed to African American authors telling life stories in promoting diverse causes from a range of African-descended ethnic backgrounds. She contends that the financial rewards of Michelle Obama’s memoir Becoming — and the testimonies it has generated — reveal African American readers look to each other for life narratives of diverse Black experiences that enable the construction, constitution, and promulgation of a credible Black self. Moreover, Moody asserts, the persistent cultural shifts of African American life writing as literary and historical phenomena have been well documented. Joining a long trajectory of critical studies, the introduction establishes the prominence of Black life writing across US history.

This chapter addresses examples of African American autobiography published before the Civil War that both called for and complicated the concept of a Black community, narratives not about the journey from slavery to freedom but about the story of a tenuous freedom and an uncertain community, a collective story under development and in need of a proper telling. Many of these autobiographies speak of platforms built, of relations established, of communities forged; others speak of the need for such platforms, the absence of immediate relations, the longing for community. What they all share, however, is the commitment to telling a different story about Black life and ambition than the one that was all but required of African Americans at the time, the story of suffering under slavery.

This chapter takes up the haunting of African American lives by examining the role of biomedicine in twentieth- and twenty-first-century African American life writing. For Black people, American biomedicine has always been a haunted house, filled with the ghosts of Black lives lost in the name of racist science and scientific racism. The approach Bailey and Peoples take questions what is knowable under biomedical frameworks. What is prohibited from knowing? What kinds of biographical and historical identities are produced in biomedicine and biomedical narratives? How, if at all, can biomedicine and Black auto/biography produce just and ethical narratives of Black lives and Black futures?

Norman’s chapter excavates a missing element in studies of the civil rights autobiography tradition: narratives by children who did not tell their own story, but who nevertheless were central to the movement and in many cases helped shape it. These include Melba Patillo Beals, one of the Littlerock Nine and author of Warriors Don’t Cry: A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock’s Central High. Norman argues that, adorned with diverse artifacts of Black print culture, Beals’s autobiography invites the reader into a journey of becoming a face of everyday Black heroism amid pervasive and fierce white commitments to segregation. Just as important as Beals’s life narrative are those of everyday living during a period of massive social change, including Rosemary Bray’s Unafraid of the Dark: A Memoir, which details a childhood shaped by poverty, Catholicism, the welfare state, and a freedom movement providing new language, models, and hopes for a nation’s citizens. Norman’s chapter ultimately traces African American autobiography by children of the movement from Amira Baraka’s daughter Lisa to Paul Coates’s son Ta-Nehisi.

Reading Caribbean autobiography as a space of difference, Aljoe’s chapter aims not to emphasize rigid separation, but rather to highlight the vibrant complexity of life writing discourses throughout global African diasporas, as well as to contribute to articulations of the myriad ways in which Black lives have been represented across the globe. Aljoe elaborates on some of the ways in which Afro-Caribbean life writing can be considered a distinct tradition within a broader tradition of transatlantic African diasporic writing. Her goal is to illuminate three key issues that distinguish Afro-Caribbean life writing: the importance of attending to mediated slave narratives within larger traditions of life writing, engagements with the imbrication of notions of national and individual sovereignty, and finally, articulation of that which is grounded in the inherently Creole culture of the Caribbean.

The complex interaction between the visual and print culture is central to transitions in definitions and perceptions of Black personhood and mid-century African American literature. Marshaled by race science and criminology, and underwriting the emergence of the periodical as media form in the United States through its advertisements for fugitives and enslaved Africans for sale, visuality was imbricated with print. Autumn Womack approaches visuality in the Anglo-African Magazine through its statistical essays in order to contend that the magazine was brokering a transition from a text-based articulation of Black freedom to one figured in and through visuality. The “visual grammar” that resulted, she argues, presented Black freedom as accomplished and aspirational. Womack thus further elaborates the scholarly contention that Black American practitioners of visuality ranged beyond those using photography, such as Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, to those debating the visual’s affordances in written texts, including Martin Delany, William J. Wilson, Ida B. Wells, Harriet Jacobs, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Louisa Picquet, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington. She argues that the Anglo-African Magazine explored and reframed the conceptual and visual dimensions of Black freedom by pursuing what optic strategies and practices it both demanded and engendered.

Matt Sandler argues that not only did African American poets write “in Romantic revolutionary moods” at mid-century, but they used the lyric, in particular, to bridge divisions within and between the abolition movement and enslaved and free people. For writers like Joshua McCarter Simpson, James Monroe Whitfield, Frances Harper, and George Moses Horton, the lyric’s amenity to both contemplation and public performance was generically useful for the deliberations on and challenges to liberal individualism they posed. These African American poets complicated the lyric’s mechanics and capacities in ways that turned its interior deliberations to revolutionary aims and “claims about the place of Black life in American history.” Overall, Sandler underscores, lyric poetry, perhaps more than any other genre, “moved across the oral/print binary” and likewise moved across the color line as well as among abolitionist, free status, fugitive, and enslaved communities and groups to facilitate coalitions. Provocatively, this made the lyric what Sandler calls “the medium of the conspiracy.”

The complex interaction between the visual and print culture is central to transitions in definitions and perceptions of Black personhood and to an understanding of mid-century African American literature. Marshaled by race science and underwriting the emergence of the periodical as a media form in the United States through its advertisements for fugitives and enslaved Africans for sale, visuality and its imbrication with print were also mobilized by Black authors to contest those racializing scripts through authorial frontispieces. The mid-century explosion of slave narrative publication and the popularization of photographic portraiture are coincident and imbricated, making visuality and viewing practices central to understanding African American autobiographical texts. In this chapter, Michael Chaney focuses on “ex-fugitive” authorial frontispieces between 1850 and 1854 within the frame of what he calls “embedded gazing and looking relations” scripted by the illustration and phenomenal success of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In doing so, he traces contestations over visual compositions of “the slave” that he argues form “the emergence of an ‘optic American slave’” during a “volatile juncture” for African American pictorial self-representation in print culture. How might, and did, Black authors challenge what Chaney calls a “viral Uncle Tom”?

Marlene Daut’s chapter focuses on Haiti as diasporic crossroads and argues that Haiti is both a geographical and an intellectual meeting place for African American writers at mid-century. For Daut, the stakes are at least twofold, one being to acknowledge African American writing as transnational, thereby altering the geography of American literature, and, second, what the Americas come to be when the Haitian Revolution appears at the center, as it did for these writers. The result, she argues, is to “expose the inherent Africanness of all American literature,” to consider African American literary tradition as multiple and linked to spaces beyond the nation, and finally to understand all American literature as diasporic, as determined not by borders and the geopolitical they assert but “by people and their movements.” In doing so, Daut examines Martin Delany’s Blake, Oneida Debois’s oratory, George Vashon’s and Pierre Faubert’s poetry, the first-known Trinidadian novel by Maxwell Phillip, Frank Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends, William Wells Brown’s Clotel, “St. Domingo, Its Revolutions and Its Patriots,” John Beard’s The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture, Baron de Vastey’s Réflexions, and the work of James McCune Smith and Henry Bibb.

This chapter considers Bahktin’s theories of the novel not only as heteroglossic but as defining this as a genre of overhearing or snooping about private life in a public form. It contributes to an emergent body of scholarship on the sonic in African American literature that newly attends to the ways in which other literary texts not merely were models in a by-now thoroughly debunked dismissal of Black aesthetics as imitative but were inscribed as “overhead.” Both the early African American novel and slave narratives politicized this defining generic characteristic, exposing the “compromised privacy and surveilled speech” endemic to slavery as preconditions of “insurgent listening.” Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents of the Life of a Slave Girl, Frederick Douglass’s The Heroic Slave, Frank Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends, Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig, and Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative are read through an attention to the sonic and overhearing that reveals the novel as both a contested genre and a way of “representing contested space and power.” Overhearing stages a dialectical politics of withholding and risky disclosure, the policing and violations the aural made possible, and the emergence of the early African American novel from this nexus of “a space of ‘conflicted listening.’”

Exercising physical and occupational mobility is often understood as central to Black freedom on a national scale. Mobility as “freedom to move” is also, as Janaka Bowman Lewis argues in this chapter, central to gendered practices of Black geography. By taking up Charlotte Forten as a case study illuminated by a host of African American women’s geographical practices at mid-century, Bowman Lewis argues for a distinct narrative genre and an understanding of mobility as far more than physical movement, proposing that “mid-century Black women’s narratives of education, individual progress, marriage and family, labor, and intellectual commitments more widely … both reflected and produced national and community rebuilding projects.” Bowman Lewis considers the ways in which Black women exercised their autonomous personhood through quotidian practices, in place, as well as through physical mobility through space. For her, Forten’s participation in the Port Royal project is no more significant a practice than those she watches Sea Island women undertake, and in fact it is through her acts of observation – not necessarily through her movement – that Forten is led to a self-realization or actualization of freedom.

The Black periodical is important in its materiality, circulation, and the serial possibilities it affords. This chapter asks us to think about the periodical not only as where mid-century Black literature can be found but also as a media technology that uniquely facilitated a “transition from a transnationalism routed through a white transatlantic sensibility to one grounded in a Black hemispheric imaginary” through serialization. The political import of serializing novels in the Black press from the early 1850s to early 1860s is explored, including Dickens’s Bleak House in 1853 in Frederick Douglass’ Paper, and Martin Delany’s Blake in the Weekly Anglo-African from 1861 to 1862. This chapter argues that these papers used serialization “to teach their readers how to relate the fight for Black freedom in the United States to transnational liberation movements.” While Bleak House taught readers not to be distracted by distant suffering, Blake’s serialization taught them that the Civil War was but one front of a Black hemispheric revolution. Haiti is located in an African American literary and political imaginary that was also mobilizing the Hungarian Revolution through serialized publication, meaning the political struggles at these sites could not be readily divorced from those of African Americans.

Often Haiti is understood as the central Black revolutionary touchstone for the time, and though Stephen Gilroy Hall examines the ways in which African American writers such as James McCune Smith, William Wells Brown, and George Vashon presented Haiti as “offering instructive lessons about the possibility” of revolution, he also considers the way in which Haiti was activated alongside the American Revolution through the writings of William C. Nell. Importantly, these writers turned to revolutionary pasts as interventions in their historical present when the threat of slavery’s expansion made for what Hall calls “an antislavery war” waged in African American historical writing.

This chapter argues that central to African American literature’s “pivot” at mid-century is its redefinition of antislavery’s activist networks “in an autonomous African American cultural and literary enterprise” that not only was shaped by transatlantic antislavery tactics and strategies, but transformed those old networks into new circuits of activism. William and Ellen Craft, Josiah Henson, and Henry Highland Garnet all undertook work that “memorialized and redefined the goals of old antislavery networks.” McCaskill considers not only Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom but also Ellen Craft’s private photograph album as establishing the wider frame in which these texts, and their imaginings of Black futures, could be taken up. Similarly, Henry Highland Garnet repurposed antislavery strategies and causes in his February 1865 sermon “Let the Monster Perish,” before the House of Representatives, by opening with his grandfather’s kidnapping from Africa and going on to sketch his own ability to forge a family with other abolitionists despite that natal disruption instituted by slavery. McCaskill argues that this and other published sermons attest to Garnet’s emergence from antislavery activism to contribute to “an emerging national literary tradition.”

Stephen Knadler challenges the alignment of physical mobility with freedom by elaborating on the debt crisis and exclusion of the mobile freeman discursively constructed as a semi-citizen under mid-century racial capitalism. In doing so, he explores the limits to aligning African American autobiographical writing primarily with the slave narrative by making a case for the emergence of a new autobiographical genre that he calls the semi-citzenship narrative. Emerging in the decade before the Civil War and written predominantly, though not exclusively, by men, this genre complicates “understanding of the relation among antebellum citizenship making, Black freedom struggles and racial capitalism.” The semi-citizenship narrative, he argues, constitutes an ignored history of the “afterlife of free labor” that unsettles the racialization of Blackness as social and legal death and whiteness as free waged labor and citizenship. That unsettling is staged through a “quasi-citizenship” articulated in accounts of the freeman’s indebtedness and “excluding out” by writers such as William Grimes, Samuel Ringgold Ward, Thomas Smallwood, and Austin Steward. Knadler argues that these writers were using their narratives to account for the “unfolding and incomplete transition of the enslaved into a third term, a so-called free person who was not quite a citizen nor yet enslaved.”

In this chapter, Erica Ball focuses on how male-authored slave narratives of the 1850s might be reconsidered as part of a wider conduct discourse depicting what it meant to live “an antislavery life,” itself a form of activism against the slavery system. Taken up by, and often presented to, African Americans as examples of masculine self-transformation, narratives authored by Samuel Ringgold Ward, Solomon Northup, Jermain W. Loguen, and Frederick Douglass taught readers that “dedication to education, morality, and the Protestant work ethic were essential for becoming self-made men.” At the same time, they also reinforced the very same anxieties and ideals articulated in free Black middle-class conduct literature. Ball reenvisions the complex cultural and political work of masculine self-making undertaken by antebellum Black autobiography as exceeding the slave narrative. The result challenges our reading of the slave narrative as emerging within abolitionist politics and focused on proving the violences of (largely southern) slavery and the authority of Black writers who had experienced them. Rather, such narratives testified to an “emerging Black middle-class identity and political culture” that also contested a racial capitalist logic of accounting for Black citizenship.