The chapter traces the long, unheralded history of Black women electric guitarists in the United States from the 1940s to the present century. It identifies the unique challenges they face striving to work in an American music landscape that adores Black women as singers but largely overlooks them when they strap an electric guitar onto their bodies. It uses historical research and oral history interviews with intergenerational artists in blues, gospel, and rock to explore how race, gender, and genre conventions manifest and intersect to create barriers and opportunities.

Foster argues for an expansion of the designation autobiography so that it signifies a consciously composed narrative of one’s own life experiences or a portion of one’s experiences. Foster observes when institutions collect the personal papers of ordinary people, the bus drivers and butlers, clerks, factory workers, farmers, nurses and nannies, even their own staff, in addition to those accumulated by the celebrated and the notorious, they find themselves in possession of scrapbooks, diaries, and other printed stories previously unknown. Still, such autobiographical works are more readily found in attics than in archives. They often are consciously compiled, handmade, homemade, spiral bound, tied, glued or artfully bound in specially purchased “albums,” “memory books,” “conference proceedings,” souvenir programs, organization minutes, and so forth. An expanded definition of African American autobiography that includes these texts provides a richer, more complex and textured view of what African American lived experience has been across time.

Wright’s position within the American literary canon has been contested by feminist literary critics who take issue with the treatment of gender in his work. Wright’s women characters, both real and fictional, when examined within the breadth of his published and unpublished works contests this interpretation by demonstrating an archive of black women’s experience unlike any from the era. Wright’s oeuvre is composed of a complex array of black women who are portrayed as mothers, workers, leaders, activists, and theorists. They are representations of the world as it is. This lineage of black women (and Wright’s relationship to the real and fictional women in his life) also evolves alongside the author’s political consciousness.

McCaskill examines three different groundbreaking texts of the second half of the twentieth century: Toni Cade Bambara’s The Black Woman (1970), Lucille Clifton’s Generations (1976), and Patricia Bell-Scott et al.’s Double Stitch (1991). Working backwards and forwards from these three texts, McCaskill’s chapter analyzes ways that Black women turned the tables on previous representations of themselves by Black men and hegemonic others as subordinate citizens, matriarchs, and ciphers.

This chapter takes up the haunting of African American lives by examining the role of biomedicine in twentieth- and twenty-first-century African American life writing. For Black people, American biomedicine has always been a haunted house, filled with the ghosts of Black lives lost in the name of racist science and scientific racism. The approach Bailey and Peoples take questions what is knowable under biomedical frameworks. What is prohibited from knowing? What kinds of biographical and historical identities are produced in biomedicine and biomedical narratives? How, if at all, can biomedicine and Black auto/biography produce just and ethical narratives of Black lives and Black futures?

The material conditions of the years between 1800 and 1830 rendered Black authors and much of African American literature “out of bounds.” Contributors engage literature by people of African descent outside of slavery’s fetters, or Black cultural producers creating work deemed untoward, or literatures developed outside the covers of bound books. In this period, the idea of Black literature was plagued not only by prohibitions on literacy and circumscription on Black people’s mobility, but also by ambivalence about what in fact would have been acceptable public discourse for people of African descent. This volume explores African American literature that elided the suppression of African American thought by directly confronting the urgencies of the moment, especially themes related to the pursuit and the experience of freedom. Transitions in the social, political, and cultural conditions of the decades in question show themselves in literary production at the turn of the nineteenth century. This volume focuses on transitions in organizational life (section 1), in mobility (section 2), in print circulation (section 3), and in visual culture (section 4).