We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
Autographs, Autobiography, and Black History in Britain: the Congo House Autograph Book.
- Authors
Burroughs, Robert
- Abstract
This article utilises a recent discovery of a textual trace of black people’s self-representation in Edwardian Britain. It concerns an autograph book, currently kept in private hands, bearing entries by black students who attended the African Institute, Colwyn Bay, in around 1905. This short text speaks to the difficulty of accessing private writings and self-representations by black people who lived in Victorian- and Edwardian-era Britain. Though there exist substantial texts written by black people in late-nineteenth-century Britain, including texts of an autobiographical type (broadly defined), self-expressive writings by black people are unquestionably rare. In retracing black lives, scholars frequently piece together information from archival and print sources. The autograph book is itself a work of fragments, though given their autobiographical character they are both rare and valuable: quotations from Shakespeare, sketches, original verse, epigrams, and quotations from scripture. These writings afford some degree of insight into the personalities of the students, who are otherwise generally represented by onlookers in the primary and secondary literature of the Institute
- Subjects
AUTOGRAPHS; AFRICAN American autobiographies; AFRICAN American history; AFRICAN American authors; LITERARY sources
- Publication
Cahiers Victoriens & Edouardiens, 2023, Issue 98, p1
- ISSN
0220-5610
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.4000/cve.13752