The Struggle for Survival in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century African American Women’s Autobiography: Black Women’s Narrative of Incarceration and Freedom

Abstract

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 essay demonstrates that the political prisoner’s memoir is a continuation of the same redemptive objective that is offered through the slave narrative.