Nancy Prince: Strategic (Re)mappings through Travel and Text

Abstract

Growing up in extreme poverty in Massachusetts, Nancy Gardner Prince (1799–1859) experienced migrancy and dislocation from an early age. In 1824, she emigrated to Russia for nearly a decade, and later emigrated to Jamaica for a brief period. As an African American author who journeyed widely in the United States and abroad, Prince’s writings reveal the racial discrimination and regulation that she endured while traveling in the US, as well as the impact that such restrictions on her freedom of movement had on her conceptions of racial kinship and national belonging. This essay approaches the regulation of Black mobility as a crucial site of racial dominance, subordination, and exclusion, and theorizes that Prince’s writings strategically remap the racially uneven conditions that she experienced on her journeys to articulate a counternarrative of Black citizenship and belonging in the US. Prince not only flips the script by publicly exposing racist conveyance operators, her autobiography also forms a counterarchive that records her ancestors’ oral histories of dispossession and US patriotism. Through close readings and attention to her revisions, we see that Prince’s engagements with territorial concepts such as “country” and “place” contemplate the tensions inherent in African American identity during the antebellum nineteenth century, as they disclose the complex negotiations that shaped her travels and texts.