Fragmented Forms in African American Women’s Memoir: Poetics, Praxis, and Politics

Fragmented Forms in African American Women’s Memoir examines fragment as formal praxis in autobiographical works by Black women makers, critics and creatives, including Claudia Rankine, Saidiya Hartman, and Beyonce Knowles. Fragmented Forms in African American Women’s Memoir examines fragment as formal praxis in autobiographical works by Black women makers, critics and creatives, including Claudia Rankine, Saidiya Hartman, and Beyonce Knowles. Exploring a range of forms, from the lyric fragment to the ellipses, from assemblages to palimpsests, this volume illuminates Black women memoirists’ use of unconventional fragmented forms in their work, expanding the formal parameters of what critics and creatives consider fragment to include these modes and examining the specific ways each of them serves the memoirists’ layered project of crafting personal life stories that unfold to reveal discursive spaces for communal ones.