Background of the Course: The Autobiography is, in some manners, the tale of an individual trying to find out who he is. As the teller journeys around restlessly, searching and appreciating other people’s existences, he is in seeking of something, although he does not recognize what it is until the close of his tale.

The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man is a narration that shows to be an autobiography whilst it's composer is a black individual attempting to go over for the white. Johnson is a mulatto who has featured himself as a politician and musician. The domination of whites in the tale genre drove him to join his mission with the socially-passable thrall-tale type and thus adapts with the levels of white bourgeois community.

Prepared and issued for common sale in 1901, Booker’s Up From Slavery has the framework of a bildungsroman. Anyway, the tale presents his childhood fights of becoming intellectual, placing an assurance on literacy as a beginning point for his vocation as an instructor at Tuskegee. The truth that Booker strove to arrive white audiences is clarified through his plans of building his autobiography according to white criteria.

The Aim of this Course: Autobiographies are established in agency and linked to institutional discourses and doctrines obtainable at a confirmed breath in time. That is to state that although authors had the liberty to write their own tales, they were constantly restricted in expressions of culture and ideology.

Public identities are of decisive worry in this course. Additive social identities protrude and are pronounced when sets from various social, racial, educational, ethnic, native, lingual and spiritual backgrounds participate societal area in public fields, in housing properties, at workplaces and in schools.

The aim of this course, therefore is to discuss the shift of African-American performances of identity in autobiographical existence writing in James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery via examining at different hands that describe the autobiographical intense difficulties for African-American authors in investigation of power and identity: like teaching, religion, political and public actualities, bondage, reluctance and flexibility and the other dares and sufferings that one meets during his lifetime.

Course Questions: The public identity of people is attached to their ethnic and educational identities which confer them a feeling of aim in existence. The cultural sets are recognized for their wares and services, manners of manufacture, foods, areas and religions. However, a radically various story arises about commune of color, particularly the African Americans. When reverberation is granted to commune of African extraction, what notion comes to mind? Of course, racialized communities through the universe join passive pictures to individuals, sets, or objects they do not recognize or to those things they understand as various.

Concerning the main books - James W. Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Booker T Washington’s Up from Slavery – which my main dissection is about, this course utilizes a number of notions and topics that are explained and clarified through models, which show a detailed prudence into the manner in which autobiographies are built. And thus far, these books assist to analyze how personality in life writing participates in the picture of Negro agency and identity.

The above-aforesaid literary subjects are inserted and demonstrated throughout this course in order to reply the prime issue. How did racial like teaching, religion, political and public actualities, bondage, reluctance and flexibility and the other dares and sufferings that one meets during his lifetime alter performances of identity and agency in Booker T. Washington’s and James Weldon Johnson’s autobiographies? How did the two writers use politics of remembering and recollections as a means to explain themselves in existence writing? This is pertinent for perception how the two autobiographies differentiate in expressions of agency and usage of language as a consequence of their various time period and space of publication, and also how bondage resistance offered a kind of identity crisis for Johnson and Washington.

Significance of the Course: Modern notions concerning the evolution of self and identity have pressed the significance of moving away from a program which is fundamentally interested with results, to one which concentrates instead on procedures of evolution and, more particularly, on a relational scene on these operations. This alteration has also commanded to increased awareness to the function of emotions in the growth of identity and self. These growths present new possibilities and provocations for theory and survey. Anyway, they also drive to new worries and questions at an academic, as well as a methodological standard.

This course discovers identity and identity formulation as viewed in the two autobiographical writings: James W. Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Booker T Washington’s Up from Slavery. There are particular matters that I want to clarify in my course as I research identity formulation like teaching, religion, political and public actualities, bondage, reluctance and flexibility and the other dares and sufferings that one meets during his lifetime.

However, the causes for the political, monetary, and crucial prosperity of the slave tales have been debated by many pundits; suffice it to state here that they required to the wish in freed Northern whites to realize the black vein and its issues by offering the existence of one person (ex-)slave as delegate of the existences of the mass of African Americans. Though most thrall tales before Reconstruction related Negro practices in bondage, they were all various from one another in expressions of agency, and thus, exposed various aspects of African-American pictures of identity.

Materials, Method and Outline: This course is grounded in academic talks concerning the black literary imitation. The tactic will thus join the literary and historical scope in order to supply an analysis of representations of identity that turn back in Johnson’s and Washington’s autobiographies. Anyway, in this course only James W. Johnson’s and Booker T. Washington’s autobiographies are utilized as case studies, so both of them do not fabricate the case for Negro pictures of identity in all autobiographies documented in the similar time interval.

Moreover, the course concentrates particularly on these two tales because, in any case Johnson’s and Washington’s various picture of identity, they mirror the same ethnic issue that has been continuing for centuries for Black-Americans. The variations between these two tales explain the prominent reality that no issue the time, space, historical proceedings, and African-Americans’ category or literacy, America had an implied ethnic trouble based on white mastery.

As prime sources, the study utilizes the published narrations of James W. Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery and concentrates on shaping the agency of both writers in a socio-political context, and matches them in order to confirm the various exemplification of identity by researching at different aspects: teaching; religion; political and public actualities; bondage; reluctance and flexibility and the other dares and sufferings that one meets during his lifetime.

Discussion: Alongside The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, the enumeration of a fair-skinned mulatto person who, after many obstacles on both aspects of the tint-line and much aching along the Negro problem in America, selects to go over for the white, driving to rumination about the identity of its composer. Teller is considerably self-consciously cynical in his treating of considerable problems regarding himself and his vein, and thus manifests to be a theme of significant self-awareness; but at other periods he is sightless to the bigotry and narrowness of his own scene and thus becomes the subject of Johnson's, and our, cynical glimpse.

The Ex-Coloured Man's tale throws into suspicion this hopeful and idealized sight of existence in the North by explaining the complicated power connections still based on vein there. To be confirmed, the teller becomes a successful and respected member of community in New York, and shifts up the social scale, which is one of the models often expressed in thrall tales, even to the extent of some ex-slaves mobilizing in the rings of the English aristocracy.

Booker’s notion of consensus can preferable be shortened through testing his recognized heading at International Exposition and the Cotton States in Atlanta in 1895. His talk was meant to appeal to the general agreement and was so prosperous in performing so that it began to be related to as the Atlanta Compromise. Booker’s achievement was in collecting actuality and philanthropic concern in a reasonable and optimistic manner for both Negros and Whites.

Booker supposed there was respect in difficult work; a feeling of achievement would be established in ascending to the top of community from gaunt starts at the bottom. Booker pushed for frugal chance to be offered to the Black-Americans before it be offered to foreigners.

Results and Conclusion: At a first glimpse, The Autobiography appears to be described by linearity and visibility: It recognizes the Ex-Colored Man’s existence tale orderly in eleven sections. Indicating to the agreements of the thrall tale, the Ex-Colored Man begins his tale with some datum about his birth-location in Southern America and his infancy, which were characteristically expressed by the obscurity of his white Dad and the total existence of his black Mom. For the Ex-Colored Man crossing, or rather disguising as a white person, symbolizes a means of earning liberty, fortune, and prestige at the similar time that it concentrates his inner disorder and duality towards the notion of vein.

Booker’s autobiography Up from Slavery was expressed the sense of words in another tongue, and it’s still in engraving. Although he was existed a slave, he obtained a good teaching and found an essential calling, and he supported other Negroes to progress their lives despite distinguishing laws. He supposed that personal liability and a spirit of adventure were decisive. Booker was advocating the frugal success of his commune, while appealing to the general agreement of both veins. Booker is calling the whites to support African-American people greater themselves. This an announcement also to their feeling of pride while giving an elevated return on their investment during the pledge of a better community and citizenship.

In short words, self representation in autobiographical inscription was doubtful for Negro writers in the feeling that it intermediated with their valid identity, because it had to render as an instrument of activism in common discourses concerning the African-American fights for similar rights.

Future Work and Recommendation: I debate that The Autobiography’s aesthetics suggests a visualization of morals that does not request or allocate but rather search and problematize virtue and normatively with its frank variation between wrong and right.

Anyway, the pains of both individuals, as well as other Negroes, ultimately led to a rise in both manufacturing education as well as higher teaching, and therefore made a change in concentration from how to develop the condition to how to block it from being worse. And thus far, future work and recommendations in this course are as the following:

• Ensure proceedings for monitoring and assessing application of universal efforts to close slavery.

• Improve implementable economic and diplomatic strategies to eliminate or decrease the slaves' obstacles.

• Take procedures to encourage a higher exemplification of slaves to ease equal entrance to employment and education chances.

• Manufacture a fund special to slaves and previous slaves to ease entrance to legal empowerment, equity, and humanitarian rest.

  
  

Key Words:

Autobiographical Tale, James Johnson, Booker Washington, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, and Up From Slavery.