Black memoir in 2015: the year America broadened its canon

This year saw a magnificent crop of African American memoirs that contributed new and important stories to a literature that had excluded them for decades

It was more than coincidence that the most talked about book at the beginning of 2015 was Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric. Citizen is a hybrid creature, blending multiple genres, prose and poetry, autobiography and bristling criticism. Its collage technique beautifully reflects the multitudes of black life in America. Rankine’s prose insists on immersing its readers, male or female, black or white, in the reality of a life lived on the colour line.

But Citizen was only the first triumph in a strong year for black American life in letters. Emerging at a time when we also saw a new energy to black activism in American life, both Citizen and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between The World and Me became defining texts of 2015. They were inextricably tangled up with a moment when black life in America retrenched along the same fault lines of racism and power.

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