[For this year’s
MLK
Day series, I’ve AmericanStudied African American lives in texts. Leading
up to this crowd-sourced post on the responses and nominees of fellow AmericanStudiers—add
yours in comments, please!]
Shil
Sen follows up Monday’s
post, writing, “Nice! Equiano should totally be required
reading in US schools and colleges.”
For a great
piece on Equiano’s book and those exact kinds of questions, see also L.D.
Burnett at the USIH blog!
Other
suggestions:
Mark Lawton
shares, “This is probably an obvious choice, but the autobiography of
Frederick Douglass will always stand out as one of the
greatest books I’ve ever read. I remember reading it in junior year in high
school and it always stuck with me.”
Andy
Cornick highlights, “Soul
on Ice, Manchild
in the Promised Land, and, I'm not kidding,
Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member.”
Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member.”
Adam Newman Tweets, “Two somewhat
complicated (due to genre) examples I would suggest are John Edgar Wideman’s Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till File
and Tressie McMillan Cottom’s Thick. Both use memoir/autobiography
but as material for analysis of contemporary & historical issues of race.”
He adds, “Both are pretty freaking amazing and Wideman’s in particular felt
largely overlooked perhaps because he is of an older generation though the book
itself is truly a tour de force. Meanwhile Cottom’s book is amazing and
thankfully getting the attention it rightly deserves.”
Matthew
Teutsch writes, “I would say Wideman's Brothers and Keepers. That is a very
powerful book. I'm also thinking about works such as John
Marrant's narrative or even something like Iceberg Slim's The Naked Soul of Iceberg Slim. Both
works highlights different periods and aspects of Black life.”
Finally, one of
the most acclaimed recent works of African American biography has to be Imani
Perry’s new Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and
Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry
(2018).
Next series starts
Monday,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other African American lives and/or texts you’d highlight?
PPS. Bryn Upton adds:
ReplyDelete"Check out D Watkins’ books The Cook Up and The Beast Side."
Rob Greene Tweets:
ReplyDelete"*Heavy* by Kiese Laymon for sure. I think John Hope Franklin’s *Mirror to America* is a good one. And Du Bois’ Autobiography from the 1960s."