UCLA

What is black life-writing beyond the canon of the slave narrative? Matters of Life: Writing Lives in the Age of United States Slavery shows that on the margins of the slave narrative exists a plenitude of forms, practices, and concepts that invite reconsideration of the premises that continue to structure understandings of the field of life-writing in the age of slavery. These premises include, but are not limited to, the following claims: that emulative lives begin in enslavement and end in freedom, that sophisticated narrative is the domain of autobiography, that authenticity and truth are the goals of life-writing. Matters of Life explores how biographical novellas, collective biographies, and scrapbooks offer alternative accounts about the possible life stories and forms that such stories take during the age of slavery in the United States.