Southernizing Travel in the Black Atlantic: Booker T. Washington's The Man Farthest Down

Abstract

F'arah J. Griffin, Cheryl J. Fish, and Alasdair Pettinger appraise scholarly approaches to travel literature in the introductions to two anthologies: A Stranger in the Village: Two Centuries of African-American Travel Writing (1998), edited by Griffin and Fish, and Always Elsewhere: Travels of the Black (1998), edited by Pettinger. Both collections excerpt Booker T. Washington's The Man Farthest Down (1912), the text of his 1910 European trip. They agree that travel writing demands more critical attention, but Griffin and Fish encourage scholars to rethink the specific significance of mobility and its relationship to subjectivity for travelers (xiv), while Pettinger is unwilling to make claims about the distinctiveness of travel literature. Pettinger insists that travel often challenge conventional definitions of the genre, yet a new general theory (xi) about what Paul Gilroy terms the black Atlantic (Gilroy ix) merely reproduces the tendency toward simple over-arching narratives (Pettinger xi).1 Pettinger argues that his anthology counteracts the disproportionate attention to white travel texts and contributes to the democratizing of travel literature (xi). These critical disagreements remind us of the theoretical and political issues involved in recovering and interpreting ignored texts. As Pettinger suggests, we would not want to impose an essentialist paradigm on travel literature, but, as Griffin and Fish note,