Solomon Northup vs. Booker T. Washington: Reconfigurations of African-American Identity in Autobiographical Life Writing

Abstract

Over centuries, life writing remained for African-Americans not only a means of psychological relief, but also a way of reinventing and re-creating the black identity in the attempt to solve the black and white dichotomy. The paper brings an insight into the discipline of history by emphasizing the importance of the black literary tradition in the American culture. Whereas white American autobiographical narratives found their place easily in American society because they represented the dominant culture, slave narratives have always embodied interior struggles of a less understood part of American culture, hiding different meanings that usually embodied psychological patterns of the same trauma of different generations of African-Americans. The purpose of this study is to investigate the shift of African-American representations of identity in autobiographical life writing in Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years A Slave and Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery by looking at three aspects that characterize the autobiographical crisis for African-American writers in search of agency and identity: Emancipation; the black jeremiad, and the issue of manhood and literacy.