Fragmented Forms in African American Women’s Memoir examines fragment as formal praxis in autobiographical works by Black women makers, critics and creatives, including Claudia Rankine, Saidiya Hartman, and Beyonce Knowles.
Fragmented Forms in African American Women’s Memoir examines fragment as formal praxis in autobiographical works by Black women makers, critics and creatives, including Claudia Rankine, Saidiya Hartman, and Beyonce Knowles. Exploring a range of forms, from the lyric fragment to the ellipses, from assemblages to palimpsests, this volume illuminates Black women memoirists’ use of unconventional fragmented forms in their work, expanding the formal parameters of what critics and creatives consider fragment to include these modes and examining the specific ways each of them serves the memoirists’ layered project of crafting personal life stories that unfold to reveal discursive spaces for communal ones.
Introduction
Chapter 1 Claudia Rankines Citizen Lyric Fragment
Who is this You?: White|Blank|Empty Space and the Multilectical You
in Claudia Rankines Citizen: An American Lyric
Chapter 2 Saidiya Hartmans Lose Your Mother Palimpsest
Between Stranger and Kin: Palimpsestic Erasures, Redacted Memoir, and the
Unwritten Name of the Mother in Saidiya Hartmans Lose Your Mother: A Journey
along the Atlantic Slave Route
Chapter 3 Winnifred Brown-Glaude, Cassandra Jackson, Piper Kendrix Williams,
and
Juda Bennett, The Toni Morrison Book Club - Interstitial Khoros
Toward a Critical Intimacy: Shared Voice, Group Memoir,
and the Interstitial, Polyphonic We in The Toni Morrison Book Club
Chapter 4 Beyoncé Knowles, Lemonade Assemblage
If We are to Heal: Reading Black Femme Inter/Subjectivities in Beyoncés
Choreoform Assemblage, Lemonade
Coda
Yolanda M. Manora earned her Ph.D. in English from Emory University and also holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Goucher College. An Associate Professor of English at the University of Alabama, Manora has received grants/funding support for her scholarly and arts-integrative research projects from the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
