Category Archives: Linking Thinking

Is it a prob­lem, asks Lawrence Hill, that many of the most famous and endur­ing fic­tional accounts of African Amer­i­cans have been penned by whites? A solu­tion to this trend of ignor­ing African-American writ­ers is to incor­po­rate mem­oirs into the body of Civil War lit­er­a­ture into the curriculum:

What’s strik­ing about such nar­ra­tives is the imme­di­acy of expres­sion. These authors have a fun­da­men­tal point to make, one of such per­sonal urgency that the reader can hardly turn away. Between each line breathes a voice that seems to whis­per: This is my name, this is when I was born, this is who I am and how I have lived, and I am going to assert my own human­ity by set­ting my story down on paper. If we are to per­suade book­stores, review­ers, librar­i­ans, and cur­ricu­lum writ­ers to look for fresh lit­er­a­ture touch­ing on the African-American expe­ri­ence, and pre­vail on teach­ers to exer­cise more imag­i­na­tion than merely shov­ing the old pile of school edi­tions of To Kill a Mock­ing­bird at yet another class of yawn­ing stu­dents, it may be mem­oir that does the trick.