Examining the life writings of African Americans from the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries, this course considers the Black experience from the vantage point of men and women who struggled to negotiate their racialized and gendered identities in a society that often denigrated both. This course illuminates what Henry Louis Gates describes in The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism as the struggle of Blacks historically to write themselves into being, that is, to accord legitimacy to their racialized selves. Students investigate the nuanced ways in which the autobiographical writings of Black men and women not only facilitated freedom of expression but served as a form of resistance by challenging the status quo.