Using the Pen as a Weapon: Reconstructing Black Womanhood in the Life Writings of Angela Davis, Elaine Brown, and Assata Shakur

Abstract

This thesis examines the reconstruction of black womanhood in the autobiographies of Angela Davis, Elaine Brown, and Assata Shakur. The main focus lies on the ways the concept of intersectionality could be used to understand how these life writings expose systems of racial and gender oppression. In doing so, this thesis discusses how these Davis, Brown, and Shakur, in telling their alternative histories of the Black Power movement, have included an essential female voice to the 20th-century tradition of African American resistance writing.