Fragmented Forms in African American Women’s Memoir

Poetics, Praxis, and Politics

Yolanda M. Manora

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2026
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781040629468
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 “Who Is This You?”: Lyric Fragment, White|Blank|Empty Space, and the Multilectical You in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric
• 2 Between Stranger and Kin: Palimpsestic Erasures, Redacted Memoir, and the Unwritten Name of the Mother in Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route
• 3 Toward a Critical Intimacy: Shared Voice, Group Memoir, and the Interstitial, Polyphonic We in The Toni Morrison Book Club
• 4 “If We Are to Heal”: Reading Black Femme Inter/Subjectivities in Beyoncé’s Choreoform Assemblage, Lemonade
• Coda
• Index