Autobiographical writing for African Americans has been a key modality for deliberating on the terms of citizenship and public agency, subjective and collective memory, private experience and political participation. This course will consider why the act of narrating the individual has been such a rich and central approach to remarking and theorizing on matters of public interest. How do the personas crafted in autobiographical accounts reflect or respond to the stakes of these social concerns? Regarding the texts to be discussed, how does “autobiography” intersect or overlap with other genres? We will attend to the cultural, historical, and political contexts that circumscribe these texts, and examine the rhetorical conventions at work, including those that define a politics of self-representation, and a politics of identity.