Autoethnography As Black Feminist Standpoint Methodology

Abstract

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, African Americans found it important to enter white debates and challenge White discourses by learning the language of their oppressors and since then, the memoirs, autobiographies and life narratives has been the most effective tool for creating and defining Black selfhood and viewpoint. Since the African American writers could not comprehend an ideology of self that separates the self from the culture or community, the personal narratives of African American also serves as a historical document demonstrating the politics of socio-cultural reality. The claim of the “I” standing for “Us” forms the very nucleus of African American autoethnographical genre of writing. The African American women autoethnographers occupy a significant and distinct place within the African American autobiographical genre which subsequently leads to the formation of Black Feminist Standpoint.