PUSHING AGAINST THE BLACK/WHITE LIMITS OF MAPS: AFRICAN AMERICAN WRITINGS OF TRAVEL

Abstract

Journeys are central to African American experience and literature. Yet comparatively little attention has been paid to African American travel accounts. This relative neglect seems due to three main factors: the low esteem in which travel writing continues to be held, despite the growth of scholarly activity in travel writing studies; the predominance in the African American canon of narratives of forced or economically determined movement; and the uneasy relationship between postcolonial and American Studies that has seen scholarship on postcolonial travel writing focus predominantly on texts from other former colonies and dominions. Rather than occupying a marginal role, however, travel writing, in its diverse forms, has been fundamental to African American literary history. Its generic indeterminacy makes it a powerful vehicle for the African American protagonist whose mobility constitutes a refusal to be fixed. Both the movement that is narrated and the porosity of the genre's borders complement the fluidity of the self whose (re)construction is in process through travel.