| The theory of travel narrative, with its emphasis on the relationship between representation, mobility, and identity---national and otherwise---would seemingly be a good theoretical fit for a wide range of canonical, African-American-authored texts, many of which focus on narratives of encounters with strangers and the figure of the journey. While the genre of travel narrative has recently begun to receive more critical attention, particularly from critics interested in theorizing how these narratives are implicated in the construction of knowledge that supports empire, narratives authored by African Americans have been under-represented and under-theorized in these early critical studies. This dissertation offers readings that put theories of African-American literature, theories of mobility, and theories of travel narrative in conversation. The texts explored in this study---William Wells Brown's The American Fugitive in Europe (1855), Nella Larsen's Quicksand (1922), Richard Wright's Pagan Spain (1955), Toni Morrison's Tar Baby (1982), and Shay Youngblood's Black Girl in Paris (2001)---are all organized (in part) around journeys to European countries. The narrators in these fictional and nonfictional texts envision their travels both as a part of the project of coming to terms with the paradoxes and divided loyalties that confront people of African descent living in the West and as novel projects that reverse the givens of relations of power, mastery, and seeing usually apparent in Euro-American travel narrative. My focus in these readings is on offering a genealogy of African American travel narrative that reveals how central mobility and the forging of connections across national boundaries are to African American identity and literature. |
