ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a close reading of Angela Davis’s 1974 autobiography, which begins with Davis’s fugitive state and later incarceration, and imagery of jails and handcuffs thread through the entire text, reflective of the systemic racial oppression still intact within the United States—a reminder that her audience’s own conversion to action is urgent. In her self-narrative, Davis constructs her activist identity through the lens of race and communist thought. There are a few moments within the text in which she addresses sexism within the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Black Panther Party, which she was involved with; however, these moments never present obstacles to her political agenda within the autobiography. Through her text, Davis presents a fluid identity that draws from the constitution of the conversion narrative and that models relentless, energetic resistance to oppression and solidarity with the oppressed.
