- Collection:
- Atlanta University and Clark Atlanta University Theses and Dissertations
- Title:
- The struggle for survival in the 19th and 20th century African American women’s autobiography: Black women’s narrative of self-made confinement and self-selected exile, 2020
- Creator:
- Briscoe, Natosha C.
- Date of Original:
- 2020-05
- Subject:
- Degrees, Academic
Dissertations, Academic - Location:
- United States, Georgia, Fulton County, Atlanta, 33.749, -84.38798
- Medium:
- theses
dissertations - Type:
- Text
- Format:
- application/pdf
- Description:
- This study examines the kinship between the female slave narrative and the writing of the female political prisoner during the Black Power Movement. The notion of imprisonment and escape has played an important role in the genre of African American Autobiography since its beginnings in the slavery era. To sustain this premise, this work will employ comparative analysis, which explores the constructional similarities between Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) and Assata Shakur’s Assata: An Autobiography (1987). This comparative analysis demonstrates that Autobiography is like Incidents in that Jacobs wrote a liberatory autobiographical text that offers mental emancipation despite her status of physical enslavement. The comparative analysis will reveal the commonality in the objectives of the struggle for survival presented in the slave narrative and the memoir of the political prisoner. Although the accounts are from two different eras, the examination will illuminate the verity that the captives give to those who are still in bondage and desperately searching for manumission. The comparison of the slave narrative and the autobiography of the political prisoner has not been widely explored in academia. In addition, the memoir of the African American woman prisoner has not been canonized as that of the woman’s slave narrative. Furthermore, the conclusion drawn from this research demonstrates that the political prisoner’s memoir is a continuation of the same redemptive objective that is offered through the slave narrative. Based on this research, it will be discovered that other slave narratives and political prisoner memoirs have similar themes.
Date of award: 2020-05
Degree type: dissertation
Degree name: Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Granting institution: Clark Atlanta University
Department: Department of Humanities
Advisor: Patterson, Charmayne - Metadata URL:
- http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12322/cau.td:2020_briscoe_natosha_c
- Holding Institution:
- Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library
- Rights:
-
