Conceived in transit, delivered in passage : Travel and identity in nineteenth-century African-American women\u27s narratives

My dissertation examines the tropes of travel and mobility in selected nineteenth-century African American women\u27s narratives, exploring the ways in which travel constitutes a signifier of black female subjectivity. It considers how the representation of travel offers ways for us to rethink dominant notions both of black female identity and of travel itself. It further posits that African-American women writers deploy travel not only to counter the historical and social forces that seek to categorize them as “natives” moored in time and place, but also to formulate a mobile identity that crosses racial, cultural, and national boundaries. In considering the spaces of articulations in which black women can tell a free, mobile, mobilizing story, I examine how Harriet Jacobs, Nancy Prince, Frances Harper, and Anna Julia Cooper move out of the confining literary structures that do not adequately map the complex discontinuities of lives. For these African-American women writers, travel is a multivalent topos that speaks to their negotiation of both textual and extra-textual spaces. My study begins with an overview of the way forms of travel produced by Western, white, male traditions have allocated black women to restrictive spaces. I then examine travel narratives of African-American women, exploring how they rechart travel and identity in relation to the poles of home/away, roots/routes, self/other, black/white, and native/traveler. Chapter Two explores Jacobs\u27s configuration of travel in relation to the genesis and composition of Incidents, the legal apparatus of the Fugitive Slave Law, and the white-authored travel writings describing the scenes of southern slavery. Chapter Three examines how Prince\u27s Life and Travels retropes the slave\u27s liminal passage in the domestic and international journeys of the free black woman. I analyze how Prince\u27s activist travels to Jamaica and Europe function as figurations of a “laboring mobility” that allow her to participate in a “black Atlantic” network of resistance. Chapter Four examines how the turn-of-the-century writings of Cooper and Harper appropriate and revise white female “conduct books of travel” as a means to reconceptualize black female mobility and manners in ways that counter the racist, socio-political discourse of Jim Crow segregation laws