Lena E. Leßlhumer

Fachbereich	Anglistik & Amerikanistik
Hauptbetreuer	Univ.-Prof. Dr. Ralph J. Poole
Nebenbetreuer	Prof. Dr. Florian Schwarz (Wien)
Beginn	WiSe 2022
Kontakt
Thema der Dissertation	Ours is the struggle of a lifetime, or maybe even many lifetimes: Trauma, complexities of lived experiences and recapture of agency in Black life writing in the US and UK“ (working title)

Abstract

This doctoral project examines how selected members of Black communities have depicted lived experiences in autobiographies and memoirs from the US and the UK, specifically in the twentieth century. Frequently marked by trauma, the lived experiences of Black people were not only influenced by the socio-political zeitgeist of the twentieth century in the respective countries, but Black autobiographical voices also took actively part in shaping their communities through their activism in political movements, their participation in civil unrests and their personal interventions in public discourses. By moving from silence into speech and through their engagement with the postcolonial notion of talking/writing back, Black writers of autobiographical narratives in these countries have reclaimed their agency and significantly shaped the perception of their community in retrospect and prospect.While this dissertation focuses primarily on twentieth-century Black life writing, it situates the selected autobiographies and memoirs within a longer historical continuum through a critical engagement with slave narratives and Black life writings in the twenty-first century. By examining Black autobiographical accounts from the United States and Great Britain in the twentieth century and by having a closer look at the larger Black literary canon, this thesis seeks to demonstrate that Black life writing operates as an evolving tradition of resistance and self-definition.Furthermore, it is advocated that autobiographical writings of Black people are central to support arguments on behalf of people who have experienced epistemic injustices due to oppression, displacement or silencing. The genre of life writing also reinforces “the need to define the individual ‘[B]lack self’ to a society that denied the existence of [B]lack reality” (Franklin 12). Notably, Black life writing continually reshapes itself in response to shifting personal lived experiences, evolving conceptions of an author’s identity as a Black person and socio-political conditions in the respective countries.