(Inter)national writing or diplomatic stories: The autobiographies of three male Black Americans in American literature

While black and African American female writers have received considerable scholarly attention recently, male black writers have not received the same attention. Consequently, the study of male black American autobiography is important. Like many critical discussions on race and gender that hint at and use boundaries as a cultural metaphor, black American autobiographies, which contain tropes of nations, play out a metaphorical (inter)national discourse through the literal racial collaboration with ghostwriters and through other textual references. Furthermore, the role of the diplomat addresses one of the most pressing difficulties Americans face at the private and international level---the difficulty with "other" races. As black Americans have a long history of dealing with Whites, a historicist approach usefully reveals different facets of an (inter)national discourse. Therefore, Chapter One, "Royal Marriage: The Diplomacy of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa," notes diplomacy through historical marriage; Chapter Two, "Spokesman Among Statesmen," considers Booker T. Washington as a culmination of diplomatic figures who play a role in the discourse on free states; and Chapter Three, "A Free Place," examines primarily the role of immigrants' experiences and autobiographies along with others, which especially foster this cultural metaphor. Black autobiographies of all three periods are needed to understand Colin Powell's contemporary twentieth century autobiography (1995), including relevant black autobiographies in the twentieth century such as jazz autobiographies and the autobiographies of black artists. From a working background and in a working tradition, Powell and others have special applicability to the work "place" which these texts describe literally and metaphorically. Additionally, diplomacy, like these texts, exists entirely in language and requires that all words be taken seriously. Notably, these writers offer stronger models for diplomacy than other models of diplomacy. Hence, as Henry Adams' scholar in The Education of Henry Adams was a consummate identity for the twentieth century, diplomats may be the identity of the twenty-first century. With the insurgence and undeniable factor of a global economy, few ideas belong to the twentieth and the twenty-first century like the diplomatic role, and clearly, these texts are not discrete entities, but constitute an important part of American literature.