Isabel Kalous Black Travel Writing

**American Culture Studies** | Volume 35

**Isabel Kalous** is an alumna of the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture at the University of Giessen, Germany, where she completed her dissertation in English and American Literature in 2020. Her research interests include African American literature, slavery and cultural memory, transnational American studies, and cultural mobility studies.

Isabel Kalous

## **Black Travel Writing**

Contemporary Narratives of Travel to Africa by African American and Black British Authors

This publication was accepted as a doctoral dissertation with the title "Contemporary Black Travel Narratives: Tracing Roots/Routes to Africa and Beyond" by the Faculty 05 - Language, Literature, Culture at the Justus Liebig University Giessen in 2020 in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

The EOSC Future project is co-funded by the European Union Horizon Programme call INFRAEOSC-03-2020, Grant Agreement number 101017536

The free availability of the e-book edition of this publication was financed by the project EOSC Future.

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### **First published in 2022 by transcript Verlag, Bielefeld © Isabel Kalous**

Cover layout: Maria Arndt, Bielefeld Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-5953-5 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-5953-9 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839459539 ISSN of series: 2747-4372 eISSN of series: 2747-4380

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### **Contents**

### **Acknowledgements**

I wish to express my sincere appreciation and gratitude to my supervisors: Dr. habil. Michael Basseler was instrumental in shaping the project and provided guidance through each stage of the process; Prof. Dr. Karsten Fitz offered much appreciated advice and encouragement that was indispensable. Thank you! I would also like to extend my gratitude to the FAZIT Foundation for the financial assistance they provided toward the completion of my dissertation. Finally, a heartfelt thanks to my family, friends, fellow doctoral students, and colleagues from *The International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture* for their motivation and emotional support throughout the PhD journey.

### **I Introduction**

### **1. Points of Departure: Tracing Roots/Routes to Africa**

The year 2019 marked four hundred years since the first enslaved Africans arrived on North American shores.1 Having been violently uprooted from their native land, transported across the Atlantic Ocean, and sold to colonists, their arrival in the British colony of Virginia is generally seen as the beginning of slavery in North America. Ghana commemorated the quatercentenary of this historical moment by declaring 2019 as the Year of Return. A massive marketing campaign launched by the Ghanaian Tourism Authority invited "the Global African family" to visit Ghana and celebrate "the cumulative resilience of all the victims of the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade who were scattered and displaced through the world" ("Year of Return"). African-descended people from around the world accepted this invitation and over the course of the Year of Return, thousands of international visitors made their way to the country. Though Ghana has been particularly popular, other West African countries too have long been prime destinations for Black travelers. Historical sites of the slave trade, such as the Elmina and Cape Coast castles, have attracted large numbers of tourists. An interest in the history of slavery, the idea of returning to an ancestral homeland, and the desire to engage with questions of identity and cultural heritage have also inspired so-called "roots travel," a term denoting that the travel destination is chosen based on the traveler's ancestry (Dillette 2). Historian Ana Lucia Araujo recently compared the Black diaspora's current attraction to Africa to the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, a period

1 Historians point out that "the history of black people in the United States is usually dated from the first arrival of a sizable number in territory that would become the United States." However, free and enslaved "Africans were already present in the Western Hemisphere before 1619" (Painter 21; see also Guasco).

during which African American arts and culture were celebrated. Araujo explains that "the diaspora wants to experience their culture and feel accepted in a place where racism is not so engrained as in many parts of the West" (qtd. in Adamu).

For many Black travelers, the journey to Africa is often an extremely emotional experience that elicits complex and ambivalent feelings. African American novelist Jacqueline Woodson, who visited Ghana in the Year of Return, expresses her emotions eloquently in an essay published in the *New York Times* in which she recounts her travel experience:

I feel something deep and old and terrifying. […]

I had never been to Africa. But stepping out of that airport the first morning, it felt as though I had always known Ghana. […]

[…] Can I belong here? Has this country truly called me home?

[…] A feeling as old as my body itself overcomes me—that I have never felt whole in one place. In Africa, like America, I am only halfway home. My body belonging to both and neither place. (Woodson)

Woodson's mediations on her stay in Ghana are exemplary of the perception of Africa by Black travelers. She addresses many of the prevalent themes and concerns that preoccupy travelers, including questions of identity, home, and belonging as well as the tension between familiarity and strangeness. For travelers like Woodson, a journey to Africa incites an exploration of their personal connections to the continent, which often presents a necessary step toward a better self-understanding.

This study examines the phenomenon of Black travel to Africa through the lens of travel writing. It brings together a range of contemporary autobiographical travel narratives published between the 1990s and early 2010s by African American and Black British authors. Their narratives are accounts of a personal journey undertaken by the traveler-writer. Among the selected texts are, for example, Eddy L. Harris's *Native Stranger: A Black American's Journey into the Heart of Africa* (1992), Barack Obama's *Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance* (1995), Keith Richburg's *Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa* (1997), Ekow Eshun's *Black Gold of the Sun: Searching for Home in Africa and Beyond* (2005), and Emily Raboteau's *Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora* (2013). While the travel narratives differ in tone and style, already their titles point to the writers' shared interests in issues of cultural and national identity, heritage, race, belonging, and home. Taken together, these texts reflect the Black diaspora's continuing interest in Africa. The travel

narratives also demonstrate that the writers' engagement with Africa is not only theoretical and imaginative but entails actual journeys to the continent. In other words, questions pertaining to identity in relation to Africa are not contemplated in an abstract space but are explored in specific geographies.

Considering that a truism of travel writing is that the physical journey of the traveling and narrating subject is mirrored in an interior journey (Roberson 221), it is apparent that the travel narratives under scrutiny represent both a journey to Africa and an exploration of the self. This self-exploration occurs while the subject is in motion—that is, traveling to and across Africa—but also during the subsequent act of writing about the experience. As the excerpt from Woodson's essay demonstrates, her trip prompts an engagement with deeply personal questions. The editors of *Mobility at Large: Globalization, Textuality and Innovative Travel Writing* (2012) underscore, travel writing can "challeng[e] the unified sense of the self in motion" (Edwards and Graulund 199), engendering processes of self-exploration in relation to space. For the traveler-writers who are in the focus of this study, "travel and its textual representation combine to create a space in which identity can be affirmed, discovered, or renegotiated" (Youngs, "Pushing" 71). These observations stimulate a set of intriguing questions that are central to this study: What is the role of travel writing in the processes of examining questions of identity, origin, belonging, and home? How is the motif of the journey represented in the narratives thematically and formally? What are the functions of this literary form for Black travelers? What can contemporary travel narratives tell us about the importance of Africa for the Black diaspora? Which concerns and themes are predominant in the writings of travel to Africa? How is Africa represented in these narratives and which functions do specific representations have? How do premediated images and attitudes toward the continent influence the depiction of Africa? To answer these and related questions, the present study combines research from the fields of literature, African American studies, diaspora studies, cultural studies, cultural mobility studies, and history and delves into the topic of Black travel and the literary representation thereof.

The books that constitute the corpus of this study are oftentimes labeled as autobiography, memoir, or creative nonfiction. In productive contrast to research that categorizes the texts in this way, my study conceptualizes them as travel narratives. This approach illustrates how these narratives can be fruitfully read within the generic frame of travel writing and draws attention to the production, reinvention, and performance of the self in relation to different

cultural, social, and political contexts as well as in relation to spatial locations. Moreover, it prompts an examination of how the genre of travel writing—a literary form that is traditionally associated with White2 (European) travel and criticized for the role it played in imperial endeavors—has been shaped in the hands of Black writers. Along with an exploration of contemporary Black travel narratives, the present study also examines the literary history of the genre of Black travel writing, illuminating its development, prevalent themes, and trajectories. I thereby seek to contribute to the study of travel writing and its manifold forms. Scholars have attested that travel—or, more broadly, movements both forced and voluntary—is a defining characteristic of the history and experience of the Black diaspora. For example, historian Robin D. G. Kelley contends that "the history of black people has been a history of movement—real and imagined" (16) and these movements also pervade their literary and cultural productions. Travel is thus a key theme in the literature of the Black diaspora. Yet, Black travel writing has received limited scholarly attention to date, despite the upsurge of publications in the field over the past decades. Drawing on research in travel writing studies as well as on scholarship from the areas of transnational African American studies, cultural studies, and history, this study seeks to correct this oversight.

The practice of journeying to Africa in an effort to discover more about oneself is not a twenty-first-century phenomenon (Dillette 1). Questions of identity, home, and belonging such as those contemplated by Woodson have indeed preoccupied people for as long as they have been displaced from Africa: Since the beginning of the slave trade, Black people have returned to the continent from various parts of the globe to explore its meaning for their sense of

2 While it has become a common practice to capitalize 'Black' to denote an ethnic identity, the capitalization of 'White' is currently debated (see, for example, the article"Why We Capitalize 'Black' (and Not 'White')" by Mike Laws). In this study, I choose to capitalize 'White' because I agree with the argument put forth by Ann Thúy Nguyễn and Maya Pendleton from *The Center for the Study of Social Policy* that "[t]o not name 'White' as a race is, in fact, an anti-Black act which frames Whiteness as both neutral and the standard"(Nguyễn and Pendleton). They reason that"the detachment of 'White' as a proper noun allows White people to sit out of conversations about race and removes accountability from White people's and White institutions' involvement in racism" (Nguyễn and Pendleton). While being aware of and condemning the capitalization of 'White' by White supremacists, the intentional use of the uppercase 'W' is meant to prompt White people, like myself, to reflect on issues of equality and privilege. Direct quotes, however, have not been changed.

self. From the American Colonization Society's repatriation efforts in Liberia in the nineteenth century to Markus Garvey's Back-to-Africa movement in the twentieth century and the roots trips to the slave forts, Black people have traveled as individuals and as part of formally organized groups, as emigrants, repatriates, settlers, missionaries, and tourists for reasons as diverse as the travelers themselves. Literary and cultural productions contributed to the allure of Africa and popularized journeys to recover ancestral relationships. The boom in genealogy research, which is fueled by the genetic testing industry, has also spurred engagement with African history and has motivated diasporic travelers to make the journey to the continent. The travelers analyzed in this study thus follow in the footsteps of other travelers, historical and contemporary, who have made the journey to Africa.

In the cultural imagination of the African diaspora, Africa has played a key role ever since enslaved Africans,3 who had survived the violent journey across the Atlantic Ocean, arrived in foreign lands. Various cultural and political meanings have been projected onto the African continent and its people. In the Black diasporic imagination, Africa functions as an identity-constituting space and a symbolic homeland. In the late twentieth and early twentyfirst centuries, African diaspora writers from the United States and Britain traveled to the continent and recounted their experiences in travel narratives. Although their transatlantic travels had different motivations and agendas, what they have in common is their desire to explore the meanings of Africa for their conceptions of self, reiterating the question that Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen poses repeatedly in his poem "Heritage" (1925): "What is Africa to me?" While this question reverberates through their travel narratives, their literary journeys initiate an engagement with broader themes related to diasporic identification and belonging, displacement, contested memories of the past, and legacies of slavery that continue to affect Black people in the present. Traveling abroad, then, is a way for people to (re)examine possible connections and affiliations to the African continent as well as

3 I use the term 'enslaved' and not 'slave' to emphasize that slavery was forced upon people and not intrinsic to their identity. As Katy Waldman writes in a 2015 *Slate* essay on the subject, "To reduce the people involved to a nonhuman noun [is] to reproduce the violence of slavery on a linguistic level; to dispense with it amount[s] to a form of emancipation" (Waldman). Likewise, I use 'enslaver' instead of 'owner,' 'master,' or 'slaveholder' because these terms reduce the enslaved person to a commodity and empower the enslaver.

to explore their often-troubled relationship with their home nation. As James T. Campbell notes in his extensive study of African American travelers, their journeys to Africa "cast fresh and unexpected light on their relationship to the United States" and illustrate that "Africa has served historically as one of the chief terrains on which African Americans have negotiated their relationship to American society" (xxiv). Campbell's statement applies to other diasporic travelers too, as my analyses of the narratives by Black British authors demonstrate.

However, while the journey to the imagined ancestral homeland is for some travelers a way to discover and form direct relations with it, others are highly skeptical of the act of recovering a lost homeland and reconnecting with lost kin. Others still are driven by a quest for roots while simultaneously criticizing such an endeavor. Such accounts reveal ambivalent conclusions about the meaning of Africa as homeland but also about the mobile subject's motive for traveling. These accounts show that travel narratives are often characterized by opposing impulses and underscore the assertion that "[m]utual imbrication rather than clear opposition between a desire for roots and an embrace of diasporic existence is symptomatic of our post-millennial moment" (Hirsch and Miller 2).

When speaking of the Black or African diaspora, it is necessary to underline that this term does not denote a homogenous collective, but instead refers to different groups of people with an African heritage who are highly diverse in terms of their geographical, social, economic, ethnic, and religious backgrounds and therefore can be better thought of as a transnational "imagined community" (Anderson). In the words of historian Colin Palmer, "diasporas are not actual but imaginary and symbolic communities and political constructs" (29). Africans and their descendants moved to different parts of the world, voluntarily or involuntarily, during different periods in time, forming a diaspora with a global presence (Raphael-Hernandez). Scholarship has drawn distinctions between different African diasporas, such as the old or historic African diaspora and the new African diaspora.The old African diaspora refers to Africans who were dispersed throughout the Americas and the Caribbean from the 1500s to the 1800s as a result of the transatlantic slave trade and who shared the collective memory of slavery, segregation, and racism; the new African diaspora refers to those whose voluntary movements to America, Europe, and Asia began in the latter half of the twentieth century.4 While highly diverse, diasporic communities share certain characteristics, including "an emotional attachment to their ancestral land," a community consciousness or sense of "identity that transcends geographic boundaries," an awareness of their displacement, and an awareness of "their oppression and alienation in the countries in which they reside" that may incite the wish to return to the ancestral homeland (Palmer 29). In this study, I use the concept of the Black or African diaspora as an umbrella term to refer to Black or African American and Black British writers.5

### **2. On the Current State of Research**

Considering that "[t]he traveller's tale is as old as fiction itself " (Hulme and Youngs 2), it may come as a surprise that it was not until the 1980s that the study of travel writing began to develop from a niche area of study to an established research field. Skeptically eyed by literary scholars as a "middlebrow form" (Thompson, *Travel Writing* 3), it had long been dismissed as a genre of low esteem due to its mainstream popularity. The last two decades of the twentieth century saw a boom in texts produced under the label of travel writing as well as the reissuing of classics and intensification of research on the topic. An impulse for the formation of the discipline of travel writing studies was generated by a shift that occurred in the humanities in the 1980s, designated as a theory revolution; literary scholars directed their attention away from established canons of dominant narratives and toward small narratives and texts from the margins to recover alternative voices that had previously been disregarded (Kuehn and Smethurst 1). Providing an expansive reservoir of texts, travel writing proved to be a rich resource for study, inspiring research across different fields, bridging literature, history, cultural studies, geography, and anthropology. Scholars such as Tim Youngs, Alasdair Pettinger, Carl Thompson, and Peter Hulme have spearheaded the research on travel writing over the past three decades and contributed immensely to

4 See also Robin Cohen (2008) for an introduction to the theory of diaspora and an overview of global diaspora studies. Cohen provides an analysis of different types of diaspora and the changing meaning of the concept in the twenty-first century.

5 Importantly, the labels 'African American,' 'Black American,' and 'Black British' are historically constructed categories that have been subject to change.

an ever-growing body of critical and historical analyses, journals, and series on this strikingly interdisciplinary field of research. Since then, numerous introductory works, companions, handbooks, article collections, and keyword collections are being published on a yearly basis.6 That travel writing studies have developed into a prolific and burgeoning academic research area is also demonstrated by the establishment of academic journals and book series on the topic as well as its institutionalization at universities (for example, the *Centre for Travel Writing Studies* at Nottingham Trent University was founded in 2002).

The proliferation of travel writing studies since the 1980s is related to the rise of postcolonial studies, which has facilitated our understanding of the power dynamics between mobility, identity, and representation that are at work in travel writing. In particular, the works of Edward W. Said and Mary Louise Pratt are credited with providing the impetus to study travel writing as well as generating invaluable insights for the analysis of travel narratives that incited much of the subsequent scholarship in the field. Said's seminal 1978 publication *Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient* is a foundational text of postcolonial studies that introduced the genre into scholarly debates by making travel writing an essential part of the corpus. Influenced by the work of Michel Foucault and his approaches to literary and cultural analysis, *Orientalism* brings the pivotal role of travel literature in European imperial projects to the fore and illustrates the mechanism at work between travel, discursive representation, knowledge, and power. The years following Said's publication saw a rapid growth of scholarship about travel writing and postcolonialism. Subsequent scholarship on travel writing predominantly focused on the works of European and North American explorers, colonizers, and missionaries to uncover the strategies used to legitimize colonization, revealing how travel writing was employed as an imperialist tool. Focusing on the literature of travel and exploration about South America and Africa from the mid-eighteenth century onward, Pratt's 1992 *Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation*, a pathbreaking work on the connection between imperialism

6 For an introduction to the field of travel writing studies see *The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing* (2002), edited by Hulme and Youngs; *Travel Writing* (2011) by Carl Thompson, the four-volume publication *Travel Writing* (2012), edited by Youngs and Forsdick; for American travel writing, see *The Cambridge Companion to American Travel Writing* (2009), edited by Bendixen and Hamera; for keywords, see *Keywords for Travel Writing Studies* (2019), edited by Forsdick et al.

and travel writing, extends Said's analyses and exposes the role of European travel writing in the production and dissemination of knowledge about what was pejoratively perceived as "the rest of the world" (5). Pratt's study is an important postcolonial critique of travel writing that highlights the connection between ideology and aesthetics. Since its publication, it has had a significant influence on ensuing works of travel studies, not least because it introduced new theoretical vocabulary that has been taken up in the fields of literary and cultural studies. Said's and Pratt's foundational work remains highly important within the field of travel writing studies and continues to energize and inspire new research.

Successive generations of critics have illuminated the ways in which the genre worked in colonial contexts and examined travel writing's suffusion with racial and imperial ideologies. For example, David Spurr (1993) outlines rhetorical strategies in travel narratives—a rhetoric of Empire—that define Western conceptions of the non-Western world. His and other works illustrate how travel writing, while claiming to depict other places, people, and cultures authentically, creates discourses that define a Western self in contrast to a non-Western Other. Traditionally, travel writing (re)affirms the supposed superiority and authority of the travel writer's own culture, values, and beliefs, while devaluing others. Representations of Africa in nineteenth-century Western travel writing are particularly potent examples of the discursive denigration, demonization, and exoticization of the continent and its people, aiming to highlight the superiority of the West and justify Western expansion, civilization, and intervention. A central tenet in critical works such as Tim Youngs's *Travellers in Africa: British Travelogues, 1850-1900* (1994) is that colonial travelogues tell us less about the places they purport to depict objectively and far more about the traveler-writer's own perspectives, ideologies, and assumptions. In light of these inquiries into the topic, it comes as no surprise that for quite some time the genre of travel writing has been "demonized" (Edwards and Graulund, "Introduction" 1) and considered a "cultural by-product of imperialism" (Ivison 201).This contestation is also connected to the fact that travel, and by extension travel writing, is often equated with "European(ized) travel" (Edwards and Graulund, "Introduction" 2). As a result, less attention has been paid to writers of non-European descent. Moreover, many scholars tend to focus on travel texts that feature voyages of exploration or leisurely and tourist journeys, neglecting involuntary movements and journeys undertaken out of necessity. As John D. Cox rightly cautions, "this restrictive focus defines the genre too narrowly, however, for people have long traveled and

written about their experiences for myriad reasons" (13). Importantly, focusing on diverse accounts of travel provides a more complicated and nuanced picture of the genre and its historical roles and purposes.

Postcolonial criticism, however, also enticed a reevaluation of perspectives and voices that had been silenced in traditional accounts of travel. Research on travel literature partly shifted its focus from revealing the colonial gaze and illustrating the imperial impulses in Westernized travelogues to narratives produced by (formerly) colonized people. This recuperative strand of critical work centers on the transgressive and liberatory potential of travel writing by marginalized authors and texts. For example, in their important work *Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing* (1998), Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan stress the genre's potential to articulate cultural critique and progressive political positions—an aspect that is also explored in Justin D. Edwards and Rune Graulund's edited collection of essays *Postcolonial Travel Writing: Critical Explorations* (2011) and in their aforementioned study *Mobility at Large* (2012). While early scholarship in the field focused predominantly on pre-twentieth-century narratives of European travel and mobility, the scope has broadened and diversified. This is exemplified by publications such as *The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Travel Writing* (2018), edited by Robert Clarke, which explores travel narratives by writers from formerly colonized nations, examining diverse topics such as the legacies of colonization, globalization, migration, gender, and race.

An increase in critical attention to travel writing by authors of African descent was motivated by the enormous influence of Paul Gilroy's seminal work on cultural studies: *The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness* (1993) was an early intervention into discourses on travel that proposed seeing travel as a framework for thinking about the experiences of enslaved and free Black people in the Atlantic world. Gilroy warns against the creation of categories of different forms or types of travel, seeing that the experiences are far too complex. Pointing to the literary productions of Black intellectuals and writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, he stresses that their work illuminates "the folly of assigning uncoerced or recreational travel experiences only to whites while viewing black people's experiences of displacement and relocation exclusively through the very different types of travelling undergone by refugees, migrants, and slaves" (133). Importantly, his work conceptualizes travel as a means to understand the experiences of Black subjects. With his examination of transatlantic biographies of artists, authors, and intellectuals, Gilroy presents a history of the Black Atlantic in which people of the African

diaspora are not perceived as victims and human commodities, but as autonomous individuals who participated in the making of a modern world. Furthermore, the significance of his work derives from its emphasis on the meaning of Africa in the creation of Black diasporic identity and the transnational and transcultural connections between people from different shores.

With these foundational contributions made by literary, postcolonial, and cultural studies scholars, the late 1990s witnessed an upsurge in interest in the travel writing by Black authors, as is demonstrated by three collections of primary texts: *Go Girl! The Black Woman's Book of Travel and Adventure* (1997), edited by Elaine Lee; *Always Elsewhere: Travel of the Black Atlantic* (1998), edited by Alasdair Pettinger; and *A Stranger in the Village: Two Centuries of African-American Travel Writing* (1998), edited by Farah J. Griffin and Cheryl J. Fish.They deserve to be mentioned because they made significant contributions to the emergent interest in Black travel writing, which had, until then, rarely drawn scholarly attention. Lee's edited collection presents a multitude of extracts from female-authored travel writings—including, for example, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, and Audre Lorde—aiming to inspire and encourage other Black women to travel (for this purpose, the book also offers trip planning advice and includes a resource guide). Pettinger's compilation of travel texts is international in scope and covers the period from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth century, presenting an abundance of literary forms of travel writing, including diaries, letters, autobiographies, memoirs, anthropology, poetry, and fictional accounts that reflect the diverse forms of mobility. Gilroy's Black Atlantic model provides the historical and geographical frame for *Always Elsewhere* because, as Pettinger writes, it "encourages us to think of the diaspora not as a river, gathering its tributaries in a relentless voyage to a final destination, but a vast ocean that touches many shores—Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, the Americas (North, Central and South)—criss-crossed in all directions by people, goods and ideas" ("Introduction" ix). Accordingly, the collection of primary texts underscores the diversity of diasporic travel experiences and their literary representation. Importantly, it incorporates accounts of the violent Atlantic crossing of captive Africans and narratives of formerly enslaved individuals, thus broadening the understanding of travel writing.

In a similar manner but with a somewhat narrower focus on African American travel writing, Griffin and Fish's anthology assembles a variety of travel narratives produced between the early nineteenth and the late twentieth century. The anthology's structure, which organizes the texts according to geographical regions (Africa, France, and Russia) and types of travelers (such as adventurers, missionaries and activists, statesmen, scholars, journalists, and tourists) highlights the multiplicity of travel destinations as well as the different motives and forces that have compelled African Americans to travel around the world. All three anthologies celebrate the myriad narrative accounts of Black travel and fulfill a meaningful function with regard to "the broader project of 'decolonizing' or 'democratizing' travel literature" by "challenging the way the canon of 'great works' of travel writing has tended to automatically privilege white men" (Pettinger, "Introduction" xixii). Significantly, these works help to correct the notion that Black people have traveled less, or only for specific purposes, and produced fewer accounts of their travels compared with White travelers.

Another noteworthy publication is the 2003 special issue of the *BMa: The Sonia Sanchez Literary Review*, edited by R. Victoria Arana.This is the first booklength collection of research articles about Black travel writing. Moreover, it includes a selection of short travel accounts, poems, and a resource guide listing books, Black professional organizations related to travel, festivals, and other resources for Black travelers. Adopting a transnational perspective, the contributions to this issue examine a host of Anglophone travel narratives and travel poems from different periods and geographies: for example, the eighteenth-century travel poems by Phillis Wheatley, the accounts of travel to Africa by twentieth-century intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois, and postcolonial travel narratives by Caryl Phillips and Jamaica Kincaid. Equally diverse are the approaches to the texts and themes that are analyzed in the collection. However, while this special issue effectively sketches the breadth of Black travel writing and illustrates various approaches to study the texts, it lacks a conceptual focus and a systematization of travel writing.

More focused designs are presented in studies focusing on singular Black traveler-writers (such as Virginia Whatley Smith's 2001 edited collection of essays on Richard Wright's travel writing) as well as those that scrutinize particular regions (such as Maria Christina Ramos's *Mapping the World Differently: African American Travel Writing About Spain*, 2015). For instance, in *Black and White Women's Travel Narratives: Antebellum Explorations* (2004), Cheryl J. Fish considers the connection between travel, gender, and race and examines nineteenth-century travel narratives by African Jamaican nurse Mary Seacole and African American Nancy Prince, among others. Her analyses demonstrate how travel writing allowed women to represent themselves outside of dominant cultural narratives, opening up discursive spaces to articulate criticism

and speak with authority on private and public issues such as slavery and women's rights. The potential of travel writing as a venue for criticism is also a topic that Gary Totten tackles in his *African American Travel Narratives from Abroad: Mobility and Cultural Work in the Age of Jim Crow* (2015). Totten's discussion of the interrelation between identity and mobility is an important contribution to the study of Black travel writing. He examines different African American travelers, including Ida B. Wells, Booker T. Washington, and Zora Neale Hurston, and their literary productions during the era of segregation. Totten's thesis resides in the argument that these writers accomplished cultural work through their mobility and writing as they challenged prevailing assumptions about the experience and history of African Americans, countering racial denigration and marginalization. *African American Travel Narratives from Abroad* is particularly relevant for the study at hand because it examines the ways travel writing has been strategically employed by African Americans; for instance, to protest segregation and discrimination, to articulate progressive political positions, to participate in transatlantic debates, to underscore (female) agency and professionality, and to challenge stereotypes pertaining to Black mobility and representations thereof. My outline of the genre's trajectories and developments draws on Totten's findings.

The increasing attention devoted to Black travel writing is also reflected by a number of articles and the topic's inclusion in companions, introductions, and collections of travel literature (see, for example, Youngs, "Pushing" and "African American Travel;" Pettinger, "At Least One;" V. W. Smith, "African American Travel"; Shaw-Thornburg, 2011). Such chapter entries and articles focus exclusively on African American travel writing; nevertheless, they provide extremely helpful introductions to the topic as they highlight the significance of travel and travel writing for African Americans and identify recurring themes in travel writing (for example, the preoccupation with the meaning of home). Crucially, these scholars do not view African American travel narratives as a subgenre of the Anglo-American literary tradition of travel writing. Rather, they suggest reading these narratives as texts that emerged from and draw on the tradition of the slave narrative—that is, autobiographical accounts by formerly enslaved people that emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As V. W. Smith writes, "African American travel writing draws its expression from the slave experience and the genre known as the slave narrative" ("African American Travel" 213). Similarly, Angela Shaw-Thornburg asserts that when the African American travel narrative is seen as a revision of the slave narrative genre, the important connection between authority, mobility, and narrative comes to the fore (51). My study builds on this proposition and delineates how Black travel writing developed from the slave narrative.

Notwithstanding the increasing diversification of the field of travel writing studies, the accounts of Black travelers remain an understudied aspect of the genre. As scholars in the field have speculated, this neglect may be due to the classificatory challenges that this hybrid form of writing presents. However, classifying these texts not as travel writing but, for example, as autobiography, results in a lack of critical attention to "the significance of mobility and its relationship to subjectivity" (Griffin and Fish xiv). Other reasons for the scarcity of research on the subject are, as Youngs specifies, the persistent tendency to focus on coerced journeys of Black subjects rather than on the free and self-initiated forms of mobility, such as tourist journeys and professional travel; but also, postcolonial scholarship's insufficient attention to African American travel writing—which addresses many of the prevalent themes that can be found in postcolonial literature ("Pushing," 72).

Although there is a scarcity of critical investigations of the genre of Black travel writing in general, especially with regard to contemporary works, a significant amount of scholarship exists that focuses on African American travel to Africa. The majority of this scholarship is situated within historical frameworks and is concerned with the biographies of Black individuals and the historical, cultural, and political circumstances under which they traveled. Such studies, however, are often not text-based studies. In *Black Writers Abroad: A Study of Black American Writers in Europe and Africa* (1999), Robert Coles examines nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American writers who left the United States and analyzes their reasons for leaving and the impact it had upon the writers' lives, careers, and work as well as upon the Black American literary tradition.The study presents astute observations on the concept of exile and the phenomenon of expatriation that is prefigured in slave narratives. Still, it does not offer an in-depth literary analysis of the travel narratives nor does it conceptualize Black travel writing as a genre. Likewise, historian Kevin Kelley Gaines's *American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era* (2006) is first and foremost a historical study of transnational intellectual and social movements during a significant period in American and Ghanaian history.

Published in 2006, *Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787- 2005* by historian James T. Campbell provides a comprehensive survey of the transnational voyages of African Americans over the course of two centuries. Campbell situates the journeys of enslaved Africans, Black colonists, missionaries, political leaders, intellectuals, writers, and journalists within their historical and cultural contexts and skillfully reveals the motivation and reasons underlying their travels to Africa. Focusing on a variety of Black American travelers, Campbell reveals the significance of Africa for Black Americans and shows that, while travelers explored their relationship to Africa, their journeys also incited reflections on their relationship to the United States. His argument that Africa has served as an important terrain on which Africandescended people have explored their relationship to American society and reflected on broader cultural developments is one of the major theses on which this study elaborates (xxiv). Along similar lines, Nemata Amelia I. Blyden's *African Americans and Africa: A New History* (2019) offers a detailed survey of African Americans' relation to the African continent, spanning from the era of slavery to the present and covering different, overlapping diasporas. Blyden lucidly illustrates how African Americans have engaged with the continent in different ways, examines their diverse and often conflicting attitudes toward Africa, and demonstrates how Black Americans' relationship to the continent has influenced the way they have identified and described themselves.

The studies by Campbell and Blyden touch on another area of interest upon which the present study builds, namely, the representations of Africa in the literature of Black writers. Marion Berghahn was among the first to explore African American writing about Africa in *The Image of Africa in Black American Literature* (1977). Her work is an important demonstration of how the White image of Africa—formed over centuries in the Western imagination and predicated on the alleged cultural superiority of the West while simultaneously degrading Africa—shapes Black Americans' perceptions of the continent. Tracing the images of Africa in the works of Black American writers from the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century, she reveals a range of attitudes toward the continents; these span from a complete disregard of Africa and an emphasis on their 'Americanness' to a radical identification with Africa that could even incite the writers' journey to the continent. John Cullen Gruesser has expanded on this topic: Building on his earlier work *White on Black: Contemporary Literature About Africa* (1992), in which he carves out conventions of Africanist writings by Anglo-American writers, *Black on Black: Twentieth-Century African AmericanWriting about Africa* (2000) highlights the different ways Black Americans engage with Africa in their literary productions. This study and his article "Afro-American Travel Literature and Africanist Discourse" (1990) detail how both fictional texts and nonfictional travel narratives

draw on established discourses about Africa that represent the continent either as a dream or nightmare. According to Gruesser, the fundamental impact of Africanist discourse has prevented African American writers from depicting a more nuanced picture of the African continent compared with that of their White counterparts ("Afro-American" 5; *Black on Black* 137-38). Considering the range of works analyzed, Gruesser's study is in need of updating to evaluate whether contemporary Black travel writers remain tied up in Africanist discourse or succeed in creating a more complex image of Africa.

Based on this survey of the current state of research on Black travel writing and African American journeys to Africa, the achievements, shortcomings, and remaining desiderata can be summarized as follows: Over the past two decades, travel writing studies have increasingly paid attention to texts produced by writers who depart from conventional notions of the (White, Western) traveler-explorer. African American travel writing in particular has come to be seen as a rich source for studying and understanding the Black diasporic experience in the United States. Scholars have pointed to the significance of travel in African American literature, the relationship between mobility and identity, and the influence of the accounts of formerly enslaved individuals on subsequent forms of travel writing. Yet, the existing scholarly contributions to the topic tend to offer only a limited overview of African American travel writing and its key themes. In many instances, these studies only refer to texts from the postbellum era or the narratives by Black Americans in the mid-twentieth century (established and well-known authors such as Wright, Du Bois, and Angelou are most often in the focus). Often, travel narratives are treated as a source for extracting the biographical and background information of the author, rather than being analyzed as texts with unique literary qualities. Another shortcoming is the insufficient connection drawn between the notion of mobility in these narratives and the construction of a traveling subjectivity. Moreover, although it has been asserted that geographical, imagined, spiritual, and emotional travel are of key importance to the diasporic experience in general and the literary output in particular, studies that treat the subject at a broad textual level are lacking. It is therefore unsurprising that no systematic study of the conventions and forms of Black travel writing exists. Another central deficit is the lack of analyses of contemporary Black travel narratives through a transnational lens. An exclusive focus on African American travelers fails to acknowledge the overarching themes and concerns that connect seemingly disparate Black travel texts and ignores the transnational dimension of the genre. Therefore, adopting

a transnational perspective, as this study does, makes it possible to discover breaks and continuities that might otherwise go unnoticed.

In essence, no in-depth textual analysis and interpretation of the travel trope in Black travel narratives has been provided thus far. Therefore, the present study seeks to contribute to the existing scholarship by providing a close textual analysis of Black travel narratives. It is my aim to extend and expand reflections on the trope of travel and exemplify the significance of volitional movement for the African American and Black British experience. By bringing together travel narratives by Black American and Black British authors, my aim is not to provide a comparison based on different national literary traditions, but rather to highlight recurring concerns, motifs, and forms in order to carve out the genre traits of the Black travel narrative.

### **3. Route Map: Theoretical Premises, Methods, and Objectives of this Study**

My interrogation of Black travel narratives builds on the premise that travel, as a lived reality and cultural practice, shapes literary traditions and that reciprocally, narrative representations of travel inspire and inform the actual journeys of individuals. Literary works are not removed from reality; they are not aesthetic objects or entities to be studied in isolation. Neither does literature simply respond to or reflect an extra-literary world, that is, experiences, events, and phenomena. Instead, literary texts generate, form, and shape our realities and cultures (Nünning and Nünning 16). Scholars such as Nelson Goodman (1978) and Jerome Bruner (1991) have drawn attention to the ways that our realities are constructed in and through language, emphasizing the significance of studying the intersections between narratives and cultures. The genre of travel writing in particular shows that there is a connection between text and travel: literature reflects these journeys and shapes them into narratives, while also being shaped by them. In this way, literary journeys influence actual journeys by informing collective assumptions and knowledge about places and by outlining travel paths.

The interplay between literary journeys in travel narratives and extra-literary journeys can be captured by the threefold concept of mimesis developed by Paul Ricœur (1984 [1983]), which facilitates our understanding of the transformation and representation of experience and social reality through narration. Taking his lead from Ricœur's concept, Ansgar Nünning productively

applies the three aspects of mimesis—prefiguration (the way a literary text is shaped by an antecedent, pre-literary reality), configuration (the representation of pre-literary reality through aesthetic and narrative techniques, which is the only aspect that can be analyzed with a literary approach), and refiguration (the effects of such configurations on the extra-literary reality)—to his theorizations of the travelogue: The stories of travel that are recounted in the travel narrative are influenced, or prefigured, by preexisting knowledge about places, which is generated, for example, by different media and texts; and they are informed by their literary predecessors as well as by individual, collective, and cultural memories of extra-literary journeys (Nünning 130-36).While drawing on actual journeys, travel narratives provide textual representations of travel and aesthetic expressions of mobility that, in turn, shape practices of travel. Underscoring the capacity of travel writing to encourage real-life journeys, Emma Bond notes that literary representations of travel—with "their imaginative and affective properties"—can thus "have a mobilizing, or moving effect" (7). The travel narratives on which this study focuses demonstrate that the writers who travel to Africa and recount their experiences step in the footprints of earlier sojourners, literally and metaphorically. The routes taken by Black travelers are historically produced and their accounts are shaped by literary representations of earlier passages. My survey of the historical, cultural, and literary travels of the African diaspora underpins the reciprocal relationship between narratives and representation of travel and travel as a lived reality.

Based on these considerations, the significance of cultural studies for the literary analysis of texts becomes pertinent. Literary and cultural studies, with their detailed attention to issues of narration, rhetoric, metaphor, plot, and genre are well equipped to examine the forms and ideological functions served by discourses of travel and mobility. Studying the relation between real-life travels, the significance of mobility in the history and experiences of diasporic cultures, the phenomenon of roots trips to Africa, and travel as a key motif in the literature of the Black diaspora necessitates an approach that merges cultural and historical scholarship with careful textual analysis and theoretical reflection. This study, therefore, offers a close and wide reading (Hallet 2007) of contemporary Black travel narratives, coupling literary methods of analysis with questions and theoretical approaches from a cultural studies perspective. To approach selected travel narratives via a close and wide reading practice draws attention to detail and the unique aesthetic qualities and narrative properties of individual texts (close reading), while

also situating and interpreting the text within its wider cultural and historical context (wide reading). In doing so, this study aims to contribute new insights to the research on contemporary Black travel writing.

The African continent is not just a prime travel destination but also an important topic in literature and criticism. From the early writings by formerly enslaved people to the poetry of Phillis Wheatley and the twentiethcentury novels by writers such as Alice Walker and Charles Johnson, the continent has been a prevalent theme in the literary imagination of Black writers (see Gruesser, *Black on Black* xi). Africa figures prominently in the contemporary African American and Black British fiction as, for example, Leila Kamali's 2016 study on the cultural memory of Africa in the literature of the Black diaspora demonstrates. Nonetheless, my focus lies not with fictional engagements with the continent, but with works that recount an actual journey to the African continent proper. This, however, does not imply that travel narratives are understood as texts that authentically represent what has happened or how it 'really' was. Rather, they are seen as an interpretation of the bygone travel experience. In this sense, my study moves beyond discussions of whether these texts represent Africa in objective ways and whether the subject's feelings toward and engagement with the places visited can be deemed authentic. I demonstrate that the journey is a central moment to the development of a self and that travel narratives are means to textually explore a sense of self in relation to the African continent as well as to examine, negotiate, and rethink national and cultural affiliations. As Edwards and Graulund point out, travel narratives prompt an "examination of the complex relationships between space, place, movement and identity, and the multiple ways in which these relationships can be represented" (*Mobility at Large* 202). Travel writing encourages an exploration of different positions and identities while the subject moves through space. The narratives analyzed in this study show how writers probe their connection to Africa, negotiate questions of belonging, and engage with the history of the Black diaspora. The physical journey, therefore, is interwoven with an interior, emotional, historical, or intellectual journey.

The travel narratives analyzed in detail in this study were published between 1992 and 2013. Marked by greater opportunities for travel, the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries witnessed an upsurge in travel narratives about Africa published by Black writers, reflecting the rising numbers of journeys to the continent by tourists, journalists, writers, scholars, as well as those who sought to resettle permanently in the homeland of their ancestors.

A similar peak could be registered in the mid-twentieth century, a time when Black American intellectuals, writers, and political leaders traveled to soonto-be or newly independent African nations. Mirroring the diversity of travelers that have embarked on journeys to the continent, this study includes texts by established writers, such as award-winning author Caryl Phillips, prominent figures, such as former US President Barack Obama and actor Isaiah Washington, as well as lesser-known authors whose works have mostly escaped scholarly scrutiny, such as those of Emily Raboteau and Ekow Eshun. By bringing these books together and putting them in dialogue with each other, the study seeks to offer new perspectives on the texts. Situated in the fields of Black literary studies and transnational African American studies, this study primarily centers on African American literary productions and interrogates the historical and cultural context of Black mobility and travel in the United States. However, it also includes travel narratives by African-descended authors from Britain. In doing so, it does not seek to establish parameters for comparison based on different national literary traditions; rather, it aims to show that the desire to journey to Africa and the contemplation of questions connected to identity and history that such a (literary) journey entails are topics prevalent in Black diasporic writing more generally. Furthermore, while these travel narratives address particular national topics and concerns, the discourses in which the texts engage often transcend national borders. In this regard, the travel narratives that comprise the corpus of this study were chosen on the basis of the topics they cover and the forms of expression and representation that they use—in other words, the textual properties of the narratives. Departing from a categorization of works solely based on the authors' countries of residence and from a comparativist pattern between two different national literary traditions, the study responds to the changes that have occurred in the field of American studies over the past three decades, namely the shift in perspective from national units of analysis to transnational concerns and discourses (Hornung and Morgan 1-2).

In addition to the analyses of eight contemporary travel narratives, my other goal in this study is to outline the genre traits of Black travel writing. I contend that the contemporary travelogues on which the analyses focus are part of a literary tradition of transnational Black travel writing that developed from the genre of the slave narrative. As an early form of Black travel writing, slave narratives foreground the important intertwinement of mobility, freedom, and subjectivity and create tropes and narrative patterns that were adopted and adapted by succeeding generations of writers. I maintain that Black travel writing should not just be understood as the marginalized writers' response to a European literary tradition. Rather, I seek to show how travel writing by Black authors, specifically those from the United States, developed as a distinct and unique form of literature in its own right. This idea connects to the wider focus of this study, which is to chart new territory in the field of travel writing studies by outlining a genealogy of Black travel writing and sketching the contours of a genre that has yet to be examined more thoroughly.

The journeys to the African continent that are represented in contemporary travel narratives cannot be adequately studied without considering the larger historical and cultural contexts of Black travel and travel writing. Historical travels of individuals and collectives, their narrative representations, as well as the modes and conventions of the travel writing genre inform the paths and destinations chosen by contemporary travelers and their strategies to represent their experiences. The difficulty of escaping prefigured plots and aesthetics shows that travel writers are unable to liberate themselves from the constitutive impact and formative power of established narratives and pretexts (Pfister, "Intertextuelles Reisen" 113). Travelogues are informed by their literary predecessors as well as by individual, collective, and cultural memories of extra-literary travels. Chapter II, therefore, provides the historical and cultural context and theorizes different forms of travel. The principal concern of this chapter is to frame and situate Black travel and Black travelers in a history of diasporic movements and to chart the diverse forms of engagement with the African continent. These engagements, as I will show, include actual journeys to Africa, such as back-to-Africa movements, expatriate travels, and modern roots tourism, as well as figurative returns, such as journeys of the imagination that manifest in cultural and literary productions and engagement with Africa for the purpose of self-identification. These literal and figurative returns underscore the significance of Africa in the history and experience of the Black diaspora.The chapter further illuminates how Africa has historically been imagined and endowed with different meanings and shows how images of the continent have been subject to change depending on the specific historical and cultural context.

Chapter III centers on the genre of travel writing by defining its features and delving into the tradition of the genre. It expands upon the claims made by scholars that the transnational genre of slave narratives established the foundations for Black travel writing. It then presents the historical context from which Black travel writing emerged and carves out its major thematic

concerns, trajectories, and literary aesthetics to demonstrate how form and content have been employed and developed by Black travel writers of later generations. This discussion of early forms of Black travel writing establishes the basis of the analyses of contemporary travel narratives in Chapter IV. This chapter is divided into four sections, each of which offers an analysis of two travel narratives. Rather than organizing these sections chronologically according to the date of the travel narratives' publication, they are arranged around specific thematic foci. Finally, the study concludes by reflecting on further avenues of research in the field of Black travel writing as well as on the current resurgence of interest in Africa as a possible site for relocation.

### **II Traveling Black—Traveling Back**

[T]he history of black people has been a history of movement—real and imagined. Repatriation to Liberia and Sierra Leone. Flight to Canada. Escape to Haiti. The great Kansas Exodus. The back-to-Africa movements of Bishop Henry McNeil Turner and Marcus Garvey. The 49th State movement. The Republic of New Africa. The Rastafarian settlement of Shashamane, Ethiopia. —*Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination*

To travel, I must always move through fear, confront terror. —*bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation*

I have suggested in the introduction that the journeys to Africa undertaken by African-descended people today are part of a larger tradition of Black travel to Africa, which dates back to the eighteenth-century repatriation of formerly enslaved people from America, the Caribbean, and Britain. Since then, innumerable travelers have made the journey from various parts of the world across the Atlantic Ocean. Past and present journeys reflect the diaspora's perennial preoccupation with Africa that arises from historical experiences and memories of displacement, dispossession, and exile. As Kelley notes in *Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination* (2002), travel and movement, whether coerced or volitional, have shaped the history and experiences of the Black diaspora (16). I therefore posit that understanding past forms of travel and the meanings attached to them is crucial for the analysis of contemporary (return) journeys.

The connection between past travels of large collectives and personal travel experiences is made explicit by feminist scholar bell hooks. In *Black Looks: Race and Representation* (1992), hooks considers the implications of travel for a person of color. She recalls incidents when she was interrogated and stripsearched by White officials upon her departure from Europe—an experience

of travel that she describes as an encounter with "the terrorizing force of white supremacy" (174). Importantly, hooks connects this experience to the historical movements of the African diaspora when she writes, "It helps to be able to link this individual experience to the collective journeying of black people, to the Middle Passage, to the mass migration of southern black folks to northern cities in the early part of the 20th century" (174). Situating her individual experience within the larger context of "the collective journeying of black people" (174), hooks underscores that her experience is not singular in this respect. It is indeed encompassed by the history of the Black diaspora, a history that is marked by dislocation, exploitation, and exclusion but also—and this seems to be even more important to hooks—by resistance, perseverance, and renewal.

Maintaining that contemporary experiences of travel as well as their literary representations must be considered within a historical and cultural context, this chapter elaborates on the meaning and history of Black mobility in the United States. Accordingly, it draws on historical scholarship, cultural studies, and mobility studies, an interdisciplinary research field that emerged in the early 2000s out of the social sciences and was spearheaded by scholars such as John Urry, Mimi Sheller, and Tim Cresswell. The field's broad conception of mobility—it encompasses "embodied and material practices of movement" as well as "the representations, ideologies, and meanings attached to both movement and stillness" (Sheller, "New Mobilities Paradigm" 789)—is particularly fruitful when examining the history of Black travel. This complex understanding of mobility opens new perspectives on the diversity of movements and modes of mobility, highlighting their multiple and complex meanings for Black subjects.

This chapter is divided into two sections and focuses on the diverse movements of Black diasporic subjects. The goal of the first section is to carve out different forms of travel that inform the history of the African diaspora. In particular, my focus will be on the African American experience and the significance of mobility as well as the different meanings associated with it. It will demonstrate that, as Griffin and Fish underscore, Black "mobility is often connected to the impulse for increased opportunities and the desire to find a home or homeland as well as for the purpose of pilgrimage, exile, and pleasure" (xiii). Moreover, this section provides an account of the ways that Black mobility has been limited and how the fight for the right to move freely is intertwined with struggles for freedom and equality. The second section of the chapter examines the diverse engagements of the Black diaspora with Africa,

highlighting the significance of the continent in the Black imagination. The fact that African-descended people persistently turn their gaze toward Africa reveals its centrality as a site of identification. The section explores the idea of return and outlines different repatriation efforts. In this context, return refers not just to realized returns (that is, actual journeys back to Africa) but encompasses imagined returns as well (these may include efforts to establish and maintain links to an originary homeland as well as political or intellectual engagement with it—a 'turn to' Africa, so to speak).1 Examining these diverse returns to Africa, it becomes apparent that the relationship to the African continent and the meanings projected onto it vary according to Black travelers' relationship with their home country and are contingent on the historical, social, and political context. Accordingly, the chapter illustrates how Africa has been imagined and scrutinizes Black Americans' different attitudes and competing impulses toward the continent.

### **1. Black Im/Mobilities Past and Present**

Scholars have alerted us to the significance of movement and travel, both real and metaphorical,2 for the history of the diaspora by drawing on the narrative arc of travel as a key trope of the African American experience: The argument that Black American history is profoundly shaped by movements is a central idea in the works of Ira Berlin (2010) as well as those of Howard Dodson and Sylviane A. Diouf (2004), who argue that African American "culture and history are the products of black peoples' various movements, coerced and voluntary" (9). The range of movements they describe and explore encompasses large-scale movements, such as migrations, as well as the small-scale movements of individuals, including journeys of escape and bodily moves.3

1 The editors of *Coming Home? Refugees, Migrants, and Those Who Stayed Behind* (2004) expound that in diaspora literature, returns take on different forms. They understand return not just as the physical act of transport and the journey back to the originary homeland but also as a process over time, revealing that returns can be "*imagined*, *provisional*, and *repatriated*" (Long and Oxfeld 6).

2 For a detailed survey of travel metaphors in cultural criticism and theory see Janet Wolff (1993) and Caren Kaplan (1996).

3 While Berlin's *The Making of African America: The Four Great Migrations* (2010) focuses on four different migratory movements, or passages, Dodson and Diouf's *In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience* (2004) identifies thirteen different movements

#### 34 Black Travel Writing

Two forms of movements are of particular importance. As Youngs asserts, African American history "rests on two archetypes of travel: the forced journey into slavery, signified by the middle passage; and the willed flight to freedom" ("Pushing" 72). These movements persistently shape Black travel and demonstrate that mobility bears different meanings. While the forced journey across the Atlantic Ocean denotes domination and oppression, free and self-regulated movements are associated with agency and resistance and are central aspects of liberty and emancipation.

Before considering the various forms of travel and the meanings attached to them in more detail, some remarks on the conceptualization of the term travel are necessary. One could certainly object to the idea of understanding the forced path into enslavement as a form of travel. Historically and in the original sense of the term, the Middle Passage describes the second, or middle, leg of the three-part voyage from Europe to Africa to the Americas and back to Europe. The triangular routes took European traders to Africa to exchange goods for enslaved Africans, then across the Atlantic Ocean to sell captives in the West Indies and North America, and finally back to Europe. The violent Atlantic crossing of an estimated 12.5 million captives, two million of whom died during the journey,4 stands for a history of dehumanization and racialized terror that lies at the heart of Black diasporic culture. In the face of unimaginable human suffering, the Middle Passage presents as a rupture from cultural and geographical roots. For this reason, hooks cautions that "[t]ravel is not a word that can be easily evoked to talk about the Middle Passage" (173) and other forms of coerced mobility. Her hesitation to use travel in this context is based on the notion that the term, in a conventional sense, is layered with European histories of imperialism and

4 The website *Slave Voyages* (slavevoyages.org) provides the most comprehensive database documenting the transatlantic slave trade.

that are seen as significant to understand the African American experience. These include, for example, the transatlantic slave trade, enslaved people's emancipatory journeys from bondage to freedom, the colonization movements, the migration movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the more recent relocation of African-born people to the US. The focus on migration as a key aspect of Black American history and culture illuminates the diverse experiences of Black people in the United States. Moreover, reading African American history as a history of migrations, Berlin offers new perspectives that complicate the linearity of the "old master narrative" from slavery to freedom and demonstrates the ongoing struggle for full equality and freedom (11).

tied up with images of the leisurely travel of the White bourgeois male. The Middle Passage as well as hooks's own travel experiences and her "encounter with terrorism" (174) surely do not fit such received understandings of travel. Forced and restricted movements disrupt established connections between travel and freedom. Acknowledging what James Clifford aptly summarizes as travel's "historical taintedness, its association with gendered, racial bodies, class privilege, specific means of conveyance, beaten paths, agents, frontiers, documents, and the like" (39), it is necessary to theorize travel "outside conventional borders" so as to produce associations "with different headings—rites of passage, immigration, enforced migration, relocation, enslavement, and homelessness" (hooks 173). Furthermore, this requires us to recognize the dominance of some travel experiences and narratives over others, and with it the difficulty of articulating experiences such as those of hooks (173). Therefore, deconstructing the term in its historical context and reconfiguring conventional conceptions of travel allows for the inclusion of more diverse experiences of travel.5

In the afterword to *The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Travel Writing*, Pratt compels us to consider this argument from a literary studies point of view. Echoing the concern of hooks, Pratt poses the question of whether we should think about the Middle Passage as travel and proposes that there might be a difference in the way we approach this question: "is this a conceptual, a political, or a moral question?" ("Afterword" 226). Considering that forms of involuntary and forced mobility, such as coerced displacement, the flight of refugees, human trafficking, and economic migrancy "also generate corpuses of stories and texts" (226), it can be argued that conceptualizing the forced journey across the Atlantic as travel and its literary representation as travel writing presents an opportunity for travel writing studies' sustained engagement with different forms of mobility (for example, forced, voluntary, leisurely, professional, and tourist). To view disparate journeys through the lens of travel writing, as this study does, facilitates an understanding of how

5 Forsdick and colleagues identify "a paradigm shift in the understanding of cultures of travel" that was introduced with works by scholars such as Said, Clifford, Pratt, hooks, and Kaplan in the late twentieth century. Their works attempt to liberate and decolonize the signification of travel, an effort that also entails a critical engagement with the concepts of culture and identity as autonomous entities. Forsdick et al. assert that "[t]he questioning of these concepts challenges the stability of the traveller's identity, and calls for a recovery of neglected journeys as well as a reexamination of what it means to travel in the postcolonial era" (61).

these representations counter, connect, and respond to more traditional accounts of travel and travel writing. Moreover, seeing that "[i]nvoluntary migration generates a literature where the equation of mobility and freedom breaks down" (227), it seems that a redefinition of the genre and the terms at large is imperative for entangling conceptual, narrative, and metaphorical connotations of travel writing. Renegotiating the parameters of travel, then, influences our perception of the genre; textual representations of mobility, in turn, shape our visions of travel. A more capacious understanding of the term travel thus facilitates an exploration, connection, and contrast of literary and cultural narratives produced by such different forms of mobility.

The Middle Passage undoubtedly persists as one of the most significant journeys in the travel writings of African diasporic authors. In line with Pratt, other travel writing scholars have also confirmed that "[t]he experience continues to generate narratives of travel, both imaginative and factual" (Youngs, "African American Travel" 112) and emphasized that "African American travel writing remains haunted by the ancestral memory of the Middle Passage […]. Every subsequent journey is liable to be measured against it" (Pettinger, "At Least One" 81). The reason why the memory of the Middle Passage continues to figure prominently in travel writings might simply be the fact that it represents "the defining moment" of the Black diasporic experience (Pedersen 225). This also holds true for travel narratives written by authors who do not have historical ties to the displacement caused by the transatlantic slave trade. Moreover, narrative accounts of self-directed, independent travel, including professional and tourist trips to Africa, pit themselves most obviously against the Middle Passage, the quintessential form of involuntary movement. In many Black travel narratives, the autonomous journey of the narrator is juxtaposed, explicitly or implicitly, with the 'initial journey' and the oppression, dehumanization, and violence it denotes, demonstrating that the memory of the Middle Passage is a stable reference in these texts. Tracing the slave ships' routes in the opposite direction, for example, from the United States to Africa, transatlantic crossings by Black individuals, such as those recounted in the narratives that will be discussed in the second part of this study, can be perceived as a symbolic reversal of the Middle Passage. The reversal of historically produced routes may be read as a response to the historic oppression and victimization, and traveling can be understood as a form of agency that had historically been denied to Black subjects. The images created by such reversed journeys counter those lasting images of African-descended people

being carried across the ocean in the holds of ships that are evoked by the history of the transatlantic slave trade.

The Middle Passage stands for the extreme violence of the slave trade and, as historian David Eltis underscores, is "probably the purest form of domination in the history of slavery as an institution" (117). The domination of African captives is epitomized by their profound immobilization.6 This immobilization is strikingly visualized by the familiar images of the cross-section of a slave ship: Chained together and densely stacked in the hold, the captives were rendered immobile even as the ship sailed across the Atlantic Ocean. Cresswell describes the Middle Passage as "an illustration of both transnational mobility […] and extreme enforced immobility" ("Black Moves" 19-20). The forced journey across the Atlantic thus embodies im/mobility7—"a paradox that runs through African-American culture" (Seiler, "Racing Mobility" 101). The African diasporic experience is indeed informed by involuntary and willed movement, imposed immobilization, as well as by efforts to create roots and claim places. As Berlin asserts, the dialectics of mobility and immobility—of movement and place, routes and roots, fluidity and fixity—create a "contrapuntal narrative" that "ripped across some four centuries of black life in mainland North America, the alternating and often overlapping impact of massive movement and deep rootedness touched all aspects of the experience of black people" (18).8

6 Despite the physical immobility and containment, enslaved Africans were by no means passive and resisted their capture whenever possible by jumping overboard and into the ocean or staging revolts, among the most memorable being the *Amistad* rebellion in 1839. The story of enslaved Africans seizing control over the ship under the lead of Sengbe Pieh (also known as Joseph Cinqué), the ensuing capture, and legal battle before the Supreme Court that resulted in the restoration of their freedom has captured the popular imagination and accentuates the resistance, courage, and agency of the captive Africans (see Rediker, *Amistad Rebellion*).

7 Mimi Sheller, in her important study *Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes* (2018), reminds us of the interdependency of mobilities and immobilities: "The use of '(im)mobilities' is meant to signal that mobility and immobility are always connected, relational, and co-dependent, such that we should always think of them together, not as binary opposites but as dynamic constellations of multiple scales, simultaneous practices, and relational meaning" (19).

8 Along similar lines, Harvey Young argues that "*stillness*, like movement […], is an integral and defining part of the Black Diaspora" (42). He points out that "[c]ontrary to popular belief, movement was not the primary feature of the Middle Passage. Captives were not always*running* from captors, *marching* (as captives) to loading docks,*sailing* on boats to the Americas, and *marching* (yet again) to auctions to be auctioned.Within and

Berlin describes the various meanings attached to movement and place when he writes,

Movement—forced and free—sometimes meant material loss, social dislocation, and spiritual fragmentation, yet sometimes signaled material gain, social improvement, and spiritual renewal. In slavery and freedom, black people twisted the meaning of movement and place, transforming places of repression into places of liberation and places of confinement into routes of escape. (20)

The 'initial journey' across the Atlantic that forced millions of Africans into slavery stands for involuntary mobility and is connected to displacement, subjugation, and oppression mobility. In Black American history and culture, however, mobility is also linked to liberation: Travel—to escape from slavery, in the form of migration and repatriation movements, and as a means to protest injustice and claim rights—connotes freedom, agency, and resistance.

Importantly, the Middle Passage does not only refer to a past moment in history but is also employed as a wide-ranging concept. The editors of *Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World* (2007) explain that "the middle passage is not merely a maritime phrase to describe one part of an oceanic voyage; it can, rather, be utilized as a concept—the structuring link between expropriation in one geographical setting and exploitation in another" (Rediker et al. 2). They further state that "the concept of the middle passage has relevance to a range of migrations involving the coerced movement of people, sometimes simultaneously with the slave trade, as part of a worldwide process of capitalist development that spanned centuries and continues to this day" (2). They argue that current inequalities and injustices, for example, the disproportionate number of people of color imprisoned in the United States, can be understood as corrosive legacies of the Middle Passage and the system of slavery.

Sheller emphasizes that "[t]he history of bodily freedom of mobility is perpetually accompanied by unfreedoms, limitations, and impairments—but

betwixt these movements, there was a lot of stillness. The captives, confined within holding cells, spent more time waiting to travel the Atlantic than it took them to sail across the ocean. Once loaded on the boats, the shackled captives continued to have limited spatial options. They remained immobile even as they moved" (42). Harvey's finding underscores the importance of considering the different meanings and implications of mobility and immobility in the context of Black diasporic experiences.

also intertwined with resistances, counter-movements, and subaltern moves" (*Mobility Justice* 64).The transatlantic slave trade and enslavement in the Americas destroyed the ability of African-descended people to move freely and determine their own bodily movements (58). The control over enslaved peoples' mobility was a method for governing Black labor and the key to domination upon which the exploitative, capitalist system of slavery was built. On plantations, enslavers asserted their power over the people held in slavery by controlling their spatial mobility. Black peoples' movements were monitored and controlled through laws and social practices; for instance, overseers watched the movements of enslaved laborers working on plantations; slave patrols enforced curfews and checked Black people for a pass that gave them permission to move outside the boundaries of their enslavers' property; slave catchers chased self-emancipated individuals and returned them to their enslavers. Therefore, White people's concerted effort to control enslaved people's mobility was in fact a form of immobilization. Writing on slavery in the antebellum South and the relationship between space, gender, and power, historian Stephanie Camp succinctly notes that slavery "entailed the strictest control of the physical and social mobility of enslaved people, as some of the institution's most resonant accouterments—shackles, chains, passes, slave patrols, and hounds—suggest" (12). As Camp notes, "laws, customs, and ideals had come together into a systematic constriction of slave movement that helped establish slaveholders' sense of mastery" (6). However, despite these fundamental impairments, people held in slavery persistently struggled to alter their conditions. They found ways to resist what Camp calls the "geography of containment," that is, the combination of different forces employed by enslavers to systematically monitor the behaviors of enslaved populations and control their movements through space and time (6).  Under the constant threat of violence, they clandestinely moved according to their own wishes and needs whenever possible. In both revolutionary and everyday ways, they defied the efforts of their enslavers to control, dehumanize, and immobilize them.

 Importantly, for enslaved African Americans, self-emancipation from slavery was predicated on their ability to move: to escape from the enslaver's control and the physical and psychological confinements of the plantation zone, to hide and prevent recapture, and to survive in hostile and unfamiliar terrain (Sheller, *Mobility Justice* 59). Through travel, freedom seekers transgressed the laws of bondage and took control over their mobility. Michelle Commander stresses the gravity of this act when she states, "Mobility—a person's control over his or her place in the world—is central to subjectivity and to one's sense of self " (8). The journey from bondage to freedom, therefore, signifies resistance to the dehumanization and objectification of Black people during chattel slavery and presents a quest for dignity and selfhood that they had been denied. For enslaved people, travel evolved into a means to assert their humanity, their psychic and bodily liberty. Such emancipatory journeys illuminate that "travel demonstrates agency, even if circumstances have left its actors with little choice. It provides a space for a degree of self-determination" (Youngs, "African American Travel" 117). Breaking free from bondage and liberating themselves from slavery's physical and psychological shackles allowed enslaved people to resurrect themselves from "social death," that is, the "imprintable" and "disposable" status imposed on them by the system of slavery (Patterson 7). The interconnection of travel and selfhood is also a central aspect in the writings of formerly enslaved and self-emancipated individuals, which I discuss in detail in Chapter III.

Narratives of freedom in African American history revolve around stories of flight and travel. An example is the Underground Railroad, the informal network of people who assisted freedom seekers in their perilous flight from slavery in the South to the free states of the North and Canada by guiding them along secret routes and providing hiding spaces and refuge along the way. In the American cultural imagination, the Underground Railroad has evolved into a myth that connects physical mobility to liberation. Like other means of transport, the train advanced into a symbol of freedom and is an imagery that figures prominently in Black literature, music, and art. Importantly, "as vessels of modern mobility and embodiments of freedom," these means of transport "served as the very antithesis to the ownership, confinement to land and shackles to place that defined the experience of enslavement in the antebellum South" (M. Hall 91). Yet, historical experiences of racial segregation and discrimination complicated such conceptions of freedom, giving paradoxical significations to images of the train and the railroad (91, 101).

The fight for the freedom of mobility is persistent throughout the history of African Americans. Since the pre-Civil War era, the importance of self-initiated and unrestricted movement has been an essential aspect of Black peoples' struggles for justice and equality. Although free travel was perceived as a basic civil right, it was withheld from African Americans. For free Black people in the antebellum North, the ability to travel without constrictions advanced into a core value in their quest for equality and citizenship, as Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor's insightful *Colored Travelers: Mobility and the Fight for Citizenship Before the Civil War* (2016) shows. They understood travel, and by extension equitable access to transportation systems and public spaces, as a quintessential aspect of social citizenship. Black travelers sought to exercise their rights as free citizens but found their mobility thwarted by the formal segregation on public transport (which was not yet institutionalized), racialized violence, and the denial of United States passports for international travel. In response, activist travelers transformed the cars and compartments of public conveyances into "critical sites for equal rights protests" (2). They protested the obstruction of their mobility by physically resisting their confinement to the Jim Crow car, arguing with White fellow passengers and railroad personnel, writing letters of complaint to state representatives, and suing railroad companies (2-3). For instance, journalist and civil rights activist Ida B. Wells famously resisted a conductor who tried to force her to move from the ladies' car to the 'colored car' (even though she had purchased a first-class ticket) by biting his hand.9 Like Wells, countless other Black travelers challenged racial segregation and the discriminatory policies on public transportation in the nineteenth century, initiating a protest tradition that informed the subsequent struggles for civil rights. Therefore, the protests against transportation restrictions of the 1950s and 1960s must be understood "as the culmination of a long and sustained history of Black protest against segregated transportation" (Bay, *Traveling Black* 12).

Laws and regulations—such as the Fugitive Slave Act (passed by Congress in 1793 and further strengthened in 1850) that required Northerners to aid in the seizure and return of self-emancipated freedom seekers—most obviously prevented African Americans from traveling freely. However, social customs and practices as well as popular culture played an equally crucial role in curbing the opportunities for movement. Slave advertisements created stereotypical images of self-emancipated individuals that were circulated through

9 Demonstrating her commitment to fight for her rights, Wells recounts the incident with the conductor as follows: "He tried to drag me out of the seat, but the moment he caught hold of my arm I fastened my teeth in the back of his hand. I had braced my feet against the seat in front and was holding to the back, and as he had already been badly bitten he didn't try it again by himself" (18-19).

newspapers calling for the capture of the so-called 'fugitive' (a term that perpetuates the stereotype of Black criminality). The Black body in motion—previously immobilized by chains and confined to slave ships, auction blocks, and plantations—was equated with criminal and unlawful movement. As Pryor underlines, White Americans "criminalized black travel by making it appear illegal, suspicious, unconscionable, inappropriate, and anathema to American identity" (45). As a result, anti-Black vigilantism was fostered as White people were encouraged to monitor and curtail Black movements in public spaces (46). In popular culture, too, Black mobilities were presented as dangerous and criminal. The figure of Jim Crow, a nineteenth-century minstrel show character played by a White performer in blackface, portrayed a violent, drunk, and lecherous Black traveler (91-92). This criminalization of Black mobile bodies was in effect another way to immobilize African Americans and limit their spatial mobility.

The limitations on travel and mobility that existed before the Civil War continued in the post-emancipation period and beyond, albeit in different forms, even though the passing of the Civil War Amendments (also known as Reconstruction Amendments) formally abolished slavery and granted African Americans the rights of citizenship. Reversing many of the gains of Reconstruction, the 1896 Supreme Court decision of the case *Plessy v. Ferguson*—which was itself a fight over the right to travel freely10—made racial segregation in public spaces constitutional on the condition that 'equal' facilities and public accommodations were provided for Black Americans. While the system of racial segregation decisively influenced all aspects of life, its effects were particularly palpable in forms of transportation (Sheller, *Mobility Justice* 61): Black passengers were relegated to the back of the buses and confined to separate compartments on trains with the purpose of 'keeping them in their place' and making autonomous movement difficult, if not impossible. In addition to the discomfort and the humiliation they experienced in the 'colored section,' they were also exposed to harassment and

10 In 1892, Homer Plessy deliberately challenged the segregation in the public transportation system in Louisiana when he refused to leave his seat in the "Whites-only" passenger car. The ensuing legal battle went to the Supreme Court and ultimately granted constitutional permission to state laws that enforced racial segregation in public accommodations and services for Black and White Americans. It was not until 1954, when the Supreme court overturned its former decision in the case *Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka*, that racial segregation was outlawed (Duignan).

physical violence. The circumscription of travel was a denial of the freedom of mobility as well as of citizens' rights and privileges that was upheld until the mid-twentieth century.

Along with the efforts to desegregate public schools and secure voting rights, mobility was an essential issue in the struggle for civil rights in the twentieth century. Seeing that autonomous mobility epitomized freedom and resistance to oppression and inequality, it is indeed difficult to overestimate its significance. As the bus boycotts and Freedom Rides demonstrate, the fight for the right to travel without discrimination has been at the center of Black people's quest for justice. Cresswell confirms that "the politics of race and the politics of mobility (particularly public transit provision) have moved side by side through the civil rights movement" (*On the Move* 261). Trains and buses became notorious sites of political protest as Black activists challenged their spatial confinement and status as second-class citizens. Among the most popular figures in the fight for citizens' rights on public transportation is certainly Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her seat for a White passenger on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955. The fight against racial discrimination was also conducted in airports. Battling the desegregation of airport terminals, African Americans turned them into "territories of confrontation over the renegotiation of racial identities in postwar America," as the 2017 study *Jim Crow Terminals* reveals (Ortlepp 10). Black people's persistent and tireless opposition to travel segregation, therefore, was a crucial part of the struggle for equality.11

As an instrument "of defiance and dignity in the journey to full equality" (Sorin 12), the automobile played a crucial role in the mobilization of Black travelers.12 African Americans with the financial means to purchase a car were able to take part in the early twentieth-century American dream of unbound spatial mobility, independence, and autonomy that was encapsulated by the

11 See Mia Bay's important study *Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance* (2021) for an in-depth account of the history of Black mobility and resistance.

12 In the landmark study *Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America* (2008), historian Cotten Seiler examines the racial politics of automobility and shows that automobility evolved into a powerful source for African Americans seeking access to the public sphere. See also Gretchen Sorin's *Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights* (2020) for a detailed study on African American travel during segregation, the role of the automobile, and the significance of Black travel guides. Sorin provides a remarkable exploration of (auto)mobility in relation to race that intertwines historical scholarship and personal accounts and experiences.

open highway, while simultaneously avoiding the humiliation and discrimination they often faced on public transport. At the same time, however, they were confronted with different obstacles as they drove through the segregated nation: The fact that hotels, restaurants, gas and service stations, and many other roadside establishments discriminated against Black customers and refused to serve them curbed the travel options and turned road trips into difficult endeavors. On the open road, Black motorists often experienced harassment and threats of violence. Traveling, therefore, required careful planning and minutiae preparation (see Bay, "Traveling Black" 22-24).

A number of travel guides catered specifically to African American motorists and travelers and provided invaluable information on hospitable businesses and accommodations across the United States. Victor H. Green's *The Negro Motorist Green Book* (1936-1966) is probably the best-known travel guide.13 Its existence and the fact that it was published for three decades testify to the perils and dangers that Black travelers faced. Heralded as the "Bible of black travel" (Taylor, "Roots"), it aimed to make traveling safer and more convenient for African Americans. It had other significant functions as well: Through its descriptions of popular travel destinations it encouraged African Americans to travel and explore the nation—"There is much to be seen and more to learn, of this our land which offers everything of beauty, wonder and history" (Schomburg, "1950" 3)—and thereby claim access to public spaces. Its depictions of "African Americans as upwardly and outwardly mobile vacationers [and] habitually mobile business travelers" (Seiler, *Republic of Drivers* 118) functioned to demonstrate that Black travelers, too, belonged on highways, trains, and airplanes, inscribing them into discourses of tourism from which they had been excluded. Importantly, the *Green Book* promoted the idea that travel could dismantle prejudice and stereotypes by facilitating interracial encounters and creating a better understanding between Black and White Americans. Quoting Mark Twain on the cover of its 1949 edition, the *Green Book* pronounced, "Travel Is Fatal to Prejudice" (Schomburg, "1949"). In the editors' view, the practice of traveling paved the way to equality. Expressing their unwavering optimism and belief in progress, the editors asserted, "There will be

13 For a comprehensive account of the *Green Book*, see the study by cultural historian Candacy Taylor with the programmatic title *Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America* (2020). In addition to Taylor's work, Sorin's recent book presents the most in-depth study of the travel guide.

a day sometime in the near future when this guide will not have to be published. That is when we as a race will have equal opportunities and privileges in the United States" (Schomburg, "1948" 1). From this perspective, tourist and vacation travel gained social and political relevance and was an act of both pleasure and defiance. The *Green Book* mobilized African Americans and encouraged them to move forward: literally, by traveling through the United States, and figuratively, by moving forward on the road to justice and equality.

African Americans traveled despite the dangers and the many constrictions they encountered. Historian Gretchen Sorin stresses the weight of such travel when she remarks that "with each mile they traveled, ordinary African Americans challenged prohibitions that prevented them from traveling and from entering segregated spaces;" travel, therefore, was a way "to claim the rights of citizenship and push the boundaries of racism" (17). To put it differently, not just activists pushed for the rights of unrestricted travel and equal access to public spaces; the leisurely journeys of tourists and the professional journeys of business travelers also challenged the status quo. Through travel, Black Americans defied the racialized spatial order and fought segregation in landscapes of travel and beyond. Segregation eventually became unconstitutional with the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Two years later the *Green Book* ended publication.

While the opportunities for travel have increased in the post-civil-rights period, Black people's mobility is still circumscribed. Travel continues to be bound up with considerable risks for Black Americans as evidenced by the two travel alerts that were issued by *The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People* (NAACP) in 2017: One advised them to exercise caution when traveling through the state of Missouri due to the high number of race-based incidents; the other warned travelers about American Airlines' discriminatory and disrespectful treatment of Black passengers.14 The issuing of these nationwide travel alerts was a novelty in the history of the civil rights organization. This and other examples, such as the reports on racial discrimination on Airbnb and the controversial screening programs of the Transportation Security Administration agents at US airports, illuminate the impairment of Black travel in the twenty-first century.

The immobilization of Black bodies continues today in different forms. For instance, the stop-and-frisk practice, which allows law enforcement officials to stop, question, search, and detain suspect passengers and drivers

14 The travel advisory for American Airlines was lifted after nine months.

without probable cause, affects people of color disproportionally. In 2013, this was brought to light by the federal class-action lawsuit *Floyd v. City of New York*, which revealed disparities in the pattern of who was stopped and interrogated by the New York Police Department. One reason for the stopping of predominantly young Black men was what the official police forms called "furtive movements," which were described as suspicious bodily moves or behavior that could, however, not be further specified (Cresswell, "Black Moves" 15). Obviously, this strikingly exposed the sustained and disturbing disparities in the treatment of different racial groups. The racial profiling and the harassment of Black drivers by the police have introduced the phrase 'Driving While Black' that has been adopted to other quotidian activities that people of color practice under the risk of being assaulted or intimidated.15 The criminalization of Black movements is also linked to the police shootings of Black people and constitutes a key concern of the Black Lives Matter Movement formed in recent years. Rod Clare underscores that the issue of mobility is central in this struggle for equality and justice when he states, "Implicit in the rise of the BLM and its attendant demands and concerns is the long-standing issue of black mobility. That is, *where* can black people go and *when* can they go there?" (123).

Recent scholarship has brought attention to the historical roots of these forms of immobilization and shown how the criminalization of Black mobility and corporeal movements is tied to a history of constructing and perceiving Black bodies in racialized ways. Scholars have emphasized that the impairment of mobility by way of stops and interrogation, which have become commonplace for people of color, resonates with different forms of monitoring Black mobilities that are prefigured by earlier episodes in African American history. In *Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness* (2015), Simone Browne

15 The term 'Driving While Black' developed in public discourses of the 1990s and is an expression that plays on the phrase 'driving while intoxicated,' which describes the criminal offense of driving while impaired by alcohol or drugs. 'Driving While Black' refers to the disproportional risk of Black drivers being stopped, searched, or arrested by law enforcement officials for minor infractions or without apparent reason at all and is associated with racial profiling. Similar phrases have spun off—such as 'Walking While Black,' 'Shopping While Black,' and 'Living While Black'—that draw attention to the racial harassment people of color experience during quotidian activities. This issue has taken on new urgency as media reports of racial profiling sum up. See also A. Davis (1997) and Gilroy ("Driving While Black").

exposes how modern surveillance technologies and practices (such as biometric technologies and security practices at airports) descend from slavery, in particular the methods used to surveil, control, and subjugate (enslaved) Black people (for example, slave patrols, lantern laws, the requirement of identity papers and slave passes, slave tags, and the branding of bodies as a means of identification).16 Moreover, in *The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness* (2020 [2012]), legal scholar Michelle Alexander outlines the immobilization of people of color in the United States through mass incarceration. Prisons represent sites where Black bodies are kept immobile. Alexander posits that the criminal justice system bears similarities to the racial caste system in the Jim Crow era when African Americans were treated as second-class citizens. Although Black im/mobility is not the focal point of her important study, she effectively illustrates how different forms of immobility are intertwined; in particular, the physical confinement and immobilization of people and the limited opportunities for upward social and economic mobility. Alexander explains that "the major institutions with which [African Americans] come into contact are designed to prevent their mobility. To put the matter starkly: The current system of control permanently locks a huge percentage of the African American community out of the mainstream society and economy" (16). Along these lines, Sheller argues that "[r]acialized mobility systems in the United States originate in the system of slavery and its coercive and violent controls over black bodies and mobilities" (*Mobility Justice* 60); these systems influence Black mobility to this day. In other words, the slave trade and enslavement continuously inform the lives of Black people and determine their options for movement and travel.

Thus far, I have outlined the diversity of different forms of travel that have played a crucial role in the African American experience. I have highlighted

16 Browne writes, "Current biometric technologies and slave branding, of course, are not one and the same; however, when we think of our contemporary moment when 'suspect' citizens, trusted travelers, prisoners, welfare recipients, and others are having their bodies informationalized by way of biometric surveillance, sometimes voluntarily and sometimes without consent or awareness, and then stored in large-scale, automated databases, some managed by the state and some owned by private interests, we can find histories of these accountings of the body in, for example, the inventory that is the *Book of Negroes*, slave ship manifests that served maritime insurance purposes, banks that issued insurance policies to slave owners against the loss of enslaved laborers, and branding as a technology of tracking blackness that sought to make certain bodies legible as property" (128).

how spatial movements are connected to freedom, liberation, justice, and citizenship, as is the case with the journeys of the enslaved to pursue their freedom, the nineteenth-century transit justice struggles, and the significance of mobility during the Civil Rights Movement. At the same time, the travels of Black people are also associated with oppression, dehumanization, and immobilization. By considering various forms of travel and the meanings attached to them, it is possible to define travel in broader terms to include experiences of travel that have often gone unnoticed. In line with Cresswell's assertion that "[w]e cannot understand new mobilities […] without understanding old mobilities" ("Towards" 29), I maintain that it is indispensable to consider the above-presented implications of travel when analyzing contemporary narratives of travel. To be certain, the journeys of Black travelers that are analyzed in this study reflect a particular privilege, financially, if nothing else; however, their mobility should not be simply understood as a given. In the context of the cultural history of Black im/mobility, their physical mobility underscores the significance of travel for people of color, which is certainly not lost on these travelers. The associations of travel with limitation and confinement on one side, and freedom, self-determination, resistance, and citizenship on the other, are crucial for understanding the underlying connotations of journeys and movements that inform Black travel and its representation in literary production.

### **2. Diasporic Return and the Significance of Africa in the Black Imagination**

To the heirs of those uprooted people, Africa quickly became a distant, intangible entity, yet for many it also remained a pivotal constituent in their search for identity, a quest for cultural roots.

—*Daria Tunca and Bénédicte Ledent, "The Power of a Singular Story: Narrating Africa and Its Diasporas"*

What is Africa to me? —*Countee Cullen, "Heritage"*

Throughout American history, the continued denial of citizens' rights and privileges and the devaluation of Black lives have led African Americans to gravitate toward Africa in a variety of ways. For instance, they have traveled

to the continent to settle either temporarily or permanently in the homeland of their ancestors and they have turned to the continent for the purpose of empowerment, cultural identification, and inspiration. The journeys to Africa and the resulting literary and cultural engagement reflect the desire of Black people in the diaspora to make sense of their personal as well as their collective and historical relationships with the continent. In the following, I examine the performed and imagined returns to Africa and delineate the different significations of Africa in the Black diasporic imagination. An understanding of Africa's centrality for the self-conception of the diaspora and the meanings attached to it is essential for the analysis of contemporary narratives of travel to Africa. As I demonstrate in Chapter IV, all of the travel narratives analyzed in this study are concerned with the question eloquently expressed by Cullen: What is Africa to me? Evidently, responses to this question vary depending on the particular cultural and historical context.

From the moment that Africans were violently uprooted from their native lands and transported to the Americas, they desired to return to Africa. The Middle Passage was for almost all Africans a one-way journey that forever separated them from their homeland. People of African descent had to create ties to the foreign and hostile land where they lived and slaved. However, they maintained a connection to Africa and expressed their persistent links to their native countries by preserving the memories of the place and by sustaining cultural and religious practices and customs, passing them from one generation to the next. The idea of Africa as the land of origin remained vital to many, as did the wish to return: "The notion of a return to the point of origin," as Gilroy points out, "predate[s] any formal organisation around this goal" and in the imagination of the enslaved, they would return to Africa eventually, even if it was only in the afterlife (*Black Atlantic* 208). In historical accounts of the slave trade and the Middle Passage, stories appear frequently of enslaved Africans jumping overboard to their deaths to free themselves and let their souls return home to Africa (see, for example, Rediker, *Slave Ship*; Snyder 2015). Similarly, tales of enslaved Africans who ascend into flight to escape from slavery and return to an African homeland permeate the African American folklore tradition. The flying African embodies mobility and resistance to slavery and oppression. Referring to this tradition of flight, Commander writes, "Literal and figurative flights closer to Africa are indicative of the ceaseless reconfigurations of resistance to elide racism and its attendant systems of domination" (5). She further points out that "Black Americans have been perpetual travelers enraptured by the promises of flight since the Middle

Passage. Flight is transcendence over one's reality—an escape predicated on imagination and the incessant longing to be free" (7). For centuries, then, the idea of return has persisted in the cultural imagination of people of African descent long after slavery ended.17

Religious beliefs also played a crucial role in strengthening the idea of return. While scholars have pointed out that religious indoctrination and conversion were used as a means of social control over enslaved Africans (as they were taught submissiveness, piousness, and acceptance of their condition), they also emphasize that enslaved people embraced the Christian tradition because it provided narratives of emancipation and freedom as well as access to symbolic resources, which they could interpret according to their purposes (Paul 168). In particular, the biblical narrative of the emancipation of the Israelites from Egyptian slavery by God emerged as an important symbol and a metaphor for their own enslavement. Enslaved people of Christian faith discovered within the Exodus story a narrative that allowed them to interpret and make sense of their condition. Albert J. Raboteau, a renowned scholar of American religious history, explains that Black Christians appropriated the Exodus narrative and "articulated their own sense of peoplehood. Exodus symbolized their common history and common destiny" (13). The narrative also nurtured enslaved people's internal resistance because it contradicted White Christians' racist claims that Black people were inferior to them and therefore destined to slavery. Sustaining their belief in a future where they would eventually be freed, the Exodus narrative provided a refuge. This belief also entailed the idea of a Promised Land, or Canaan, which "referred not only to the condition of freedom but also to the territory of freedom—the North or Canada" (14). In the Black imagination Africa, too, emerged as the Promised Land to which African-descended people were meant to return. The idea of a return formed the foundations of the Black Zionist tradition. The Exodus narrative found its way into spirituals sung by the enslaved, in abolitionist writings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and in speeches held

17 For an account of the stories of flying Africans in the folklore of enslaved people, see Jason R. Young's 2017 article "All God's Children Had Wings: The Flying African in History, Literature, and Lore."

during the Civil Rights Movement of the twentieth century and served as a blueprint for the Rastafari belief that developed in the 1930s in Jamaica.18

The first organized efforts to return to Africa began in the eighteenth century. From then onward, formerly enslaved and free Black people from North American as well as from other Western societies began to repatriate to Africa, inciting the long tradition of traveling and emigrating to the continent that has come to be known as Back-to-Africa movements. Many others followed their routes to Africa, including Black missionaries, emigrationists (that is, proponents of emigration), intellectuals, scholars, political figures, and tourists. The repatriation of Black people began after the American Revolutionary War. Several thousand enslaved Black people joined the fight on the side of the British, enticed by the promise that they were to earn their freedom. After Britain's defeat, some of the Black Loyalists settled in Nova Scotia or were brought to London by British forces. In both locales, however, they faced hardships and frustration, such as severe climate, food shortages, and labor exploitation in Canada, and discrimination and poverty in England. Seeking alleviation from the precarious living conditions of London's so-called 'Black Poor,' the charitable organization Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor supported the founding of a British colony on the west coast of Africa. This first effort at repatriation was a historic event: In 1787, a ship set sail for Sierra Leone carrying several hundred members of the Black community from London who established a rudimentary coastal settlement upon arrival. A few years later, in 1792, some 1,200 Black Loyalists from Nova Scotia followed and built a second colony. In both colonies, however, the settlers faced conflicts with local Africans and were plagued by disease as they were ill-equipped for life in such an environment.

The repatriation of Black people from America to Sierra Leone was also supported by the American Colonization Society (ACS) founded in 1816. Established and dominated by White people, their motives to sponsor and encourage Black emigration initiatives were highly controversial. Some thought of their work as a humanitarian effort aimed at relieving Black people from slavery; others subscribed to the belief that White and free Black people could not coexist and thought it best to remove the Black population from the United

18 On the Exodus narrative as a key cultural metanarrative of Afro-Atlantic communities, see Rhonda R. Thomas's *Claiming Exodus: A Cultural History of Afro-Atlantic Identity, 1774- 1903* (2013).

States. Southern enslavers who were members of the ACS backed the endeavor because they saw the growing population of freeborn and recently emancipated Black people as a threat to the institution of slavery. Black Americans predominantly denounced ACS-sponsored emigration; they viewed it as a deportation scheme meant to remove free Black people from the country where they had been born (Blyden 103). However, the ACS played an important role in the repatriation efforts of Black Americans as the organization acquired land and over the course of the nineteenth century brought a few thousand migrants to West Africa. In 1819, the organization founded another colony south of Sierra Leone: the Republic of Liberia, which became an independent nation in 1847. The mid-nineteenth century witnessed a significant increase in Liberia's settler population. Regardless of the many hardships they faced, from the arduous ship voyage that cost the lives of many prospective settlers to the difficulties that emigrants encountered when landing on African shores, Black Americans continued to leave the United States, having lost faith in a country that did not accept them as equals. Their journeys testified to the intense longing for freedom and a better life.

In the nineteenth century, Black "emigrationists looked upon Africa as the new promised land, a land of milk and honey where its offspring in the diaspora could return and thrive" (Kelley 21). Among the most influential figures calling for Black repatriation to Africa were the merchant and shipowner Paul Cuffe, who brought 38 Black settlers to Sierra Leone in 1816; Daniel Coker, who immigrated to Sierra Leone and become the first Methodist missionary; the physician Martin Delany, who led an exploration party to West Africa in the 1860s; and Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, who founded the International Migration Society and organized two voyages to Africa in the late nineteenth century which brought Black emigrants to Liberia.19 These emigrationists carried American political, legal, social, and cultural conventions with them as they prepared to settle in Africa. Supporters of emigration and the settlers who were steeped in American belief and value systems viewed it as their responsibility to 'enlighten' native Africans. The return of Black Americans to Africa was seen "as a kind of civilizing mission, bringing Christianity to the heathens and technology and knowledge to the backward natives," an endeavor to redeem Africa—not from European colonialism but from the decline of its civilization, thus signaling a "radically different cultural approach to 'return'"

19 For a detailed study on Black emigrationists and colonizers, see Campbell (2006) and Blyden (2019).

(Kelley 21). Gaines, who connects the imperialist civilizing mission with the ideology of racial uplift, explains that those who supported and participated in this mission believed that they could demonstrate their fitness for US citizenship and counter racial stereotypes by presenting themselves as "agents of civilization" ("Black Americans" 437). This attitude says much about how Black emigrationists of this time thought about Africa. As a result, the consequences of Black emigration and colonization were often disastrous for the local population because the newly arrived settlers did not view Africans as equals and frequently exploited and dispossessed them (Dodson and Diouf 77). Needless to say, there is an inherent irony in the way that people fled from discrimination and exploitation in the United States only to arrive in Africa and establish themselves as the superior population, devaluing the culture of the local inhabitants.

Unsurprisingly, controversial stances on the debates about emigration existed within Black American communities. The idea to return to their ancestral African homeland resonated with those who felt that they would never be fully integrated into American society and that their struggle for equality was a delusion. True freedom, they argued, was to be sought outside the national boundaries of the United States. In their imagination, Africa transformed into a utopian, paradisiacal homeland where Black people could prosper free from oppression and exploitation. Moreover, their return to the continent presented an antidote to the dispossession they experienced in the United States. For them, Africa was both a past and future home. By contrast, opponents of Black emigration, such as Frederick Douglass, did not think of Africa as a potential homeland and rejected the colonization movements. To them, Africa was irrelevant and repatriation efforts were seen as a distraction from the necessary struggle for equality in the United States (Campbell 67). Reasoning that they were first and foremost Americans, they argued that Black people belonged in the United States and were determined to fight for their rights and claim the country in whose building and development they had played a quintessential role. They displayed fierce opposition to emigration and denounced the movement, trusting that they would gain freedom and equality in the United States at last. The different sentiments and attitudes demonstrate that throughout history, Black people were divided on the topic of repatriation. Furthermore, the controversies over this issue also reveal the heterogeneity of Black people's experiences in the United States.