Rhetoric And Resistance In Black Womens Autobiography

Author : Johnnie M. Stover
Publisher : Orange Grove Texts Plus
ISBN 13 : 9781616101350
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.50/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Rhetoric and Resistance in Black Women's Autobiography written by Johnnie M. Stover and published by Orange Grove Texts Plus. This book was released on 2009-09-24 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Johnnie M. Stover explores the origin and power of black women writers' voices using the personal narratives of 19th-century Americans who were slaves or indentured servants. Displaying aspects of the oral traditions of Yoruba culture in West Africa, these voices took on a subversive tone, a form of expression that Stover describes as the "mother tongue" and argues is completely different from literary forms employed by white men or women or black men. Stover maintains that the mother tongue--a system of linguistic and physical techniques--developed in response to black women's struggles to find outlets for expression in a white male dominated society. The African American mother tongue is not a result of biology but grew out of the need of black women to resist oppression. It is a combination of words, rhythms, sounds, and silences that black women encoded with veiled meanings. Moreover, it is a physical way of communicating--a look, a set of the lips, a positioning of the hand, hip, and head. It is a stance, an attitude of resistance, and a powerful force in social and political as well as literary life. She proposes that the linguistic practices are a balance of African, European, and African American communicative techniques and include secrets, silences, hesitations, whispers, feigned misunderstanding, lying, masking, mumbling, sass, invective, impudence, and dissembling. Stover focuses on four texts that employ the mother tongue and engage sociopolitical issues of the 19th century--Harriet Wilson's Our Nig, Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Elizabeth Keckley's Behind the Scenes, and Susie King Taylor's Reminiscences of My Life in Camp. Rhetoric and Resistancewill affect the way African American women's autobiography is read today and will be valuable to scholoars interested in linguistics and 19th-century literature and in African American, multicultural, and women's studies.

Author : Dr. Bharat Arvind Tupere
Publisher : Lulu.com
ISBN 13 : 179488064X
Total Pages : 252 pages
Book Rating : 4.41/5 ( download)

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Download or read book EXPRESSION OF SELF-EMANCIPATION A Study of Black Women's Autobiographies written by Dr. Bharat Arvind Tupere and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Monique McDade
Publisher : U of Nebraska Press
ISBN 13 : 1496235290
Total Pages : 265 pages
Book Rating : 4.99/5 ( download)

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Download or read book California Dreams and American Contradictions written by Monique McDade and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2023-03 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: California Dreams and American Contradictions establishes a genealogy of western American women writers publishing between 1870 and 1965 to argue that both white women and women of color regionalized dominant national literary trends to negotiate the contradictions between an American liberal individualism and American equality. Monique McDade analyzes works by María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Helen Hunt Jackson, Sui Sin Far, and a previously unstudied African American writer, Eva Rutland, to trace an archive of western American women writers who made visible what dominant genres subsumed under images of American progress and westward expansion. Read together these writers provide new entry points into the political debates that have plagued the United States since the nation's founding and that set the precedent for westward expansion. Their romances, regional sketches, memoirs, and journalism point to the inherently antagonistic relationship between a Rooseveltian rugged individualism that encouraged an Anglo male-dominated West and the progressive equality and opportunity the West seemingly promised disenfranchised citizens. The writers included in California Dreams and American Contradictions challenged literature's role in creating regional division, conformist communities that support nationally sponsored images of gendered, ethnic, and immigrant others, and liberal histories validated through a strategic vocabulary rooted in "freedom," "equality," and "progress."

Author : Katrina M. Powell
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3030645983
Total Pages : 216 pages
Book Rating : 4.84/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Performing Autobiography written by Katrina M. Powell and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-06-14 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Performing Auto/biography: Narrating a Life as Activism analyzes the rhetorical strategies employed in five authors’ auto/biographical texts, examining their representations of identities and the public implications of writing individual identity. Exploring the ways race, class, culture, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality might affect the form(s) in which writers choose to write (e.g., memoir, fictional autobiography, poetry), questions how autobiographers challenge notions of genre, truth, and representation. This builds on the argument that constructing identity is a Performing Autobiography performance, one that can simultaneously use and subvert traditional notions of rhetoric and genre. By examining the auto/biographical texts of Zora Neale Hurston, Audre Lorde, Dorothy Allison, Joyce Johnson, and Shirley Geok-lin Lim together, the book theorizes self-representation and genres as rhetorical performances, and therefore their texts can be seen as “performative auto/biography”—transgressive archives where readers are asked to consider their own identities and act accordingly. In doing so, this book contributes to growing theories in feminist rhetorics and auto/biography studies, arguing that these performative genres advocate for life narratives as political and social activism.

Author : Patricia Bizzell
Publisher : Modern Language Association
ISBN 13 : 1603295224
Total Pages : 422 pages
Book Rating : 4.22/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Nineteenth-Century American Activist Rhetorics written by Patricia Bizzell and published by Modern Language Association. This book was released on 2020-12-15 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the nineteenth century the United States was ablaze with activism and reform: people of all races, creeds, classes, and genders engaged with diverse intellectual, social, and civic issues. This cutting-edge, revelatory book focuses on rhetoric that is overtly political and oriented to social reform. It not only contributes to our historical understanding of the period by covering a wide array of contexts--from letters, preaching, and speeches to labor organizing, protests, journalism, and theater by white and Black women, Indigenous people, and Chinese immigrants--but also relates conflicts over imperialism, colonialism, women's rights, temperance, and slavery to today's struggles over racial justice, sexual freedom, access to multimodal knowledge, and the unjust effects of sociopolitical hierarchies. The editors' introduction traces recent scholarship on activist rhetorics and the turn in rhetorical theory toward the work of marginalized voices calling for radical social change.

Author : Brenda DeVore Marshall
Publisher : Lexington Books
ISBN 13 : 1461634253
Total Pages : 223 pages
Book Rating : 4.56/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Telling Political Lives written by Brenda DeVore Marshall and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2008-06-24 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates the autobiographical writings of Barbara Jordan, Patricia Schroeder, Geraldine Ferraro, Elizabeth Dole, Wilma Mankiller, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Madeleine Albright, and Christine Todd Whitman. These eight women represent the diversity that permeates the cultural backgrounds, life adventures, and ideologies women bring to the political table. From differences in race, class, and geographic location, to variations in personal and family experiences, religious beliefs, and political ideology, these women illustrate many of the divergent standpoints from which women craft their lives in the United States. Each essay focuses on the autobiographical text as political discourse and therefore, as an appropriate site for the rhetorical construction of a personal and civic self situated within local and national political communities. The collection examines issues such as the intersection between the "politicization of the private and the personalization of the public" evident in the women's narratives; the description of U.S. politics the women provide in their writings; the ways in which the women's personal stories craft arguments about their political ideologies; the strategies these women leaders employ in navigating the gendered double-binds of politics; and, the manner in which the women's discourse serves to encourage, instruct, and empower future women leaders. The analyses embody and explicate the political and rhetorical strategies these leaders employ in their efforts to act on their convictions, highlight the need for and reality of women's involvement in all levels of politics, and serve as an impetus and inspiration for scholars and activists alike.

Author : Elizabeth J. Natalle
Publisher : Lexington Books
ISBN 13 : 1498512224
Total Pages : 167 pages
Book Rating : 4.20/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Michelle Obama written by Elizabeth J. Natalle and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2015-08-27 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michelle Obama: First Lady, American Rhetor is an edited anthology that explores the persona and speech-making of the country’s first African American first lady. The result of these thought-provoking essays is an interdisciplinary text that explores the First Lady from a rhetorical and cultural point of view. Authors analyze her Democratic National Convention speeches, her brand as First Lady, her communication from her latest trip to Africa, her agenda rhetoric in Let’s Move! and Reach Higher, and her coming out as a Black feminist intellectual when she spoke at Maya Angelou’s memorial service. Readers will recognize Michelle Obama as a rhetor of our times—a woman who influences America at the intersections of gender, race, and class and who is representative of what women are today.

Author : Dianne Petrov
Publisher : GRIN Verlag
ISBN 13 : 3346339378
Total Pages : 45 pages
Book Rating : 4.79/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Race, Gender and Politics in Michelle Obama’s Autobiography "Becoming". An African American Women's Autobiography and First Lady Memoir written by Dianne Petrov and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2021-02-03 with total page 45 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bachelor Thesis from the year 2020 in the subject American Studies - Literature, University of Luxembourg, language: English, abstract: This BA dissertation is dedicated to the genre of autobiographies, also known as life writing. It focuses on Michelle Obama's 2018 memoir "Becoming" and discusses both the traditions of African-American female autobiographies and the political memoir genre. "Becoming" permits Obama to tell her own story to set the record straight. It gives her the opportunity to rewrite her story and define her own identity for herself. Writing as a former political figure–the First Lady of the United States of America, Obama does not refrain from incorporating her personal life as well as a personal message. As a former First Lady, "Becoming" can be understood as being part of the genre of the First Lady memoir. As such, Obama’s autobiography can be defined as an intersection between African American women’s autobiographies and the genre of First Lady memoir which have both been largely excluded from the literary canon. Thus, Obama constitutes a minority within a minority as she is not only a First Lady, but she is the nation’s only African American First Lady. Moreover, Obama constitutes a political observer and having written one of the most valuable autobiographies of the twenty-first century, she illustrates how despite the fact that African Americans have largely been excluded from American politics, her autobiography demonstrates the progress America has made by electing its first African American president. In this thesis, it is my contention that Obama’s autobiography "Becoming" constructs an amalgamation between African American women’s life writing and the autobiographical sub-genre of the First Lady memoir. African American women autobiographers construct a self that has, as Terrell puts it, two central handicaps – gender and race. This statement from the 20th century captures the intersectionality of African American women’s identities. In her autobiography "Becoming", Michelle Obama shows her awareness of her intersectional identity as she writes ‘I’ve been the only woman, the only African American, in all sorts of rooms’. Thus, the tradition of African American women’s autobiographies requires a suitable theoretical framework when examining their texts.

Author : Ariel M. Sheetrit
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000052435
Total Pages : 197 pages
Book Rating : 4.35/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Poetics of Arabic Autobiography written by Ariel M. Sheetrit and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-02-27 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the poetics of autobiographical masterpieces written in Arabic by Leila Abouzeid, Hanan al-Shaykh, Samuel Shimon, Abd al-Rahman Munif, Salim Barakat, Mohamed Choukri and Hanna Abu Hanna. These literary works articulate the life story of each author in ways that undermine the expectation that the "self"—the "auto" of autobiography—would be the dominant narrative focus. Although every autobiography naturally includes and relates to others to one degree or another, these autobiographies tend to foreground other characters, voices, places and texts to the extent that at times it appears as though the autobiographical subject has dropped out of sight, even to the point of raising the question: is this an autobiography? These are indeed autobiographies, Sheetrit argues, albeit articulating the story of the self in unconventional ways. Sheetrit offers in-depth literary studies that expose each text’s distinct strategy for life narrative. Crucial to this book’s approach is the innovative theoretical foundation of relational autobiography that reveals the grounding of the self within the collective—not as symbolic of it. This framework exposes the intersection of the story of the autobiographical subject with the stories of others and the tensions between personal and communal discourse. Relational strategies for self-representation expose a movement between two seemingly opposing desires—the desire to separate and dissociate from others, and the desire to engage and integrate within a particular relationship, community, culture or milieu. This interplay between disentangling and conscious entangling constitutes the leitmotif that unites the studies in this book.

Author : Elena V. Shabliy
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 1793631425
Total Pages : 185 pages
Book Rating : 4.28/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Women’s Human Rights in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture written by Elena V. Shabliy and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-08-24 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women’s Human Rights in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture sheds light on women's rights advancements in the nineteenth century and early twentieth-century through explorations of literature and culture from this time period. With an international emphasis, contributors illuminate the range and diversity of women’s work as novelists, journalists, and short story writers and analyze the New Woman phenomenon, feminist impulse, and the diversity of the women writers. Studying writing by authors such as Alice Meynell, Thomas Hardy, Netta Syrett, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Mary Seacole, Charlotte Brontë, and Jean Rhys, the contributors analyze women’s voices and works on the subject of women’s rights and the representation of the New Woman.