| Sumario: | The present article analyzes The Autobiography of James Lindsay Smith (1881), a largely ignored text written by a former slave after the American Civil War. His text is a remarkable example of the black autobiographies written between the end of the war and the turn of the century which struggled to find a new format, style and language that would distance them from the genre of the slave narrative. Although Smith still relies on certain set episodes from the antebellum genre, he also demythologizes slave solidarity, and emphasizes black servants' strategies to survive in a hostile world. Besides, he incorporates, for the first time in postbellum black American literature, a historical appreciation of the African American war effort and vindicates the figure of the black soldier.
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