African American Identity Travels
Participant Bios and Presentation Abstracts
JAMES T. CAMPBELL
Associate Professor, American Civilization and Africana Studies, Brown
University
Professor James T. Campbell is author of Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa (Oxford University Press, 1995/University of North Carolina Press, 1998), which was awarded the Organization of American Historians' Frederick Jackson Turner Prize and the Carl Sandberg Literary Award for Nonfiction. His articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in such journals as The Journal of Southern African Studies, Transformations, The Journal of African History, Dissent, African Studies, The American Historical Review, and the Encyclopaedia Britannica Macropedia. Professor Campbell has been a Research Associate at the W.E.B. Du Bois Center for Pan-African Studies, Accra, Ghana, and at the African Studies Institute, the University of the Witwatersrand and has been the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship and a Social Science Research Council Fellowship. Professor Campbell's current research focuses on African American travelers in Africa.
"Apropos Prepossessions: Reading Nineteenth-Century African American Travel Accounts of Africa "
This paper discusses some of the generic properties of travel writing as a form, and of 19th century African travel accounts in particular; and then explores what happens when this dense, highly racialized form gets appropriated by African Americans. The chief focus of the paper will be Martin Delany's Official Record of the Niger Valley Exploring Party, which is a record of his 1859 trip to Yorubaland.
SANDRA GUNNING
Associate Professor, Department of English, the Program in American Culture,
and the Program in Afroamerican and African Studies, University of Michigan
Professor Sandra Gunning is author of Race, Rape and Lynching: The Red Record of American Literature, 1894-1912 (Oxford University Press, 1996); "Nancy Prince and the Politics of Mobility, Home and Diasporic (Mis)Identification" (American Quarterly 2001); and "Traveling with Her Mother's Tastes: The Negotiation of Gender, Race, and Location in The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands" (Signs 2001). She is co-editor with Michele Mitchell and Tera Hunter of Dialogues of Dispersal: Gender, Sexuality, and African Diasporas, a 2003 special issue of Gender and History. Professor Gunning is completing a book project, Locating Blackness: Place, Mobility, and Identity in the Early Literature of the African Diaspora, which explores black Anglophone writing and the shaping of community and individual identity in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
"Imperial Subjectivity, Gender, and 19th Century West Indian Emigration to Africa: The Case of Robert Campbell's A Pilgrimage to My Motherland"
Recently, scholars have focused on the power of cultural connectedness within the African diaspora as expressed by music, religious practices, political thought, and so on. However, despite a new spate of studies on pre-20th century diaspora politics, there is still relatively little on the intersection of European imperialism and "back-to-Africa" emigration schemes, and especially on the impact of gendered subjectivity. My paper explores the problem of cultural cooptation, alienation and gendered self-invention in the context of American and West Indian immigration to the West Africa in the mid-nineteenth century. Robert Campbell is the Jamaican who accompanied the more famous Martin Delany in 1859 to explore the possibilities of establishing a black American migrant settlement in the Niger Valley. Though Campbell's 1861 Pilgrimage has generally been overshadowed by Delany's Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party, my interest here is not in any sort of canonical recuperation. Rather, I analyze Campbell's subject position as a light-skinned middle-class Jamaican educator who reached West Africa by way of Panama and then Philadelphia, and as such stood at the intersection of British colonial and diasporic interests. While on the one hand he served under the auspices of African Americans pushing for emigration, his presence as a West Indian marked his connection to yet another immigrant group: middle-class West Indian men who had been recruited by the British to serve as petty civil servants in the establishment and control of Sierra Leone. At the same time, Campbell's narrative articulated his affinity to the rising professional class of Christianized Africans such as the Rev. Samuel Crowther and his sons, individuals who were themselves products of internal migrations within African "back" to ancestral homelands and who were also influenced by the same British colonial systems of education and religion that shaped Campbell. In the paper I use Campbell and his cultural connection within West Africa to explore the question of how migration and cultures of colonialism produce a particular kind of diasporic black male subjectivity. I also argue that this subjectivity is in turn compounded by yet another trait of empire: in his narrative Campbell styles himself as an African "explorer," making a direct connection between his travels to Africa and heroic British figures such as Richard Burton, John Hanning Speke, the brothers Richard and John Lander, and Mungo Park, men who, in the case of Burton especially, would not have accepted Campbell into their circle because of his race.
PATRICK HILL
Instructor, Ethnic Studies, Bowling Green State University
Professor Patrick Hill is author of "The Castration of Memphis Cooly: Race, Gender, and Nationalist Iconography in the Flag Art of Faith Ringgold" in Dancing at the Louvre: Faith Ringgold's French Collection and Other Story Quilts (New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1998). His current research project, The Harlem Globetrotters’ Cold War: Basketball, Black Performance and the (Ex)Sporting of American Empire, 1950-1963, explores the ways in which African-American participation in international sporting competitions both advanced and contested the interests of U.S. national image management and examines the manner in which black athletes exploited the space provided by the Cold War conflict to articulate a new national cultural identity suited to the realities of the postwar era.
"Sport and the Remaking of African-American Internationalism in the Cold War Era: Lessons from the Harlem Globetrotters' Early Goodwill Tours"
Since at least the time the great tragedian Ira Aldridge captivated the theatre publics and crowned heads of mid-19th century Europe, African-American stage performers traveling abroad have presented "America" as a potent symbol both of "freedom" and the persistent denials of human liberty which quietly underwrite and sustain it. This thinly-veiled commentary on the foundational myth/ideals of U.S. nationhood—a commentary embodied quite literally in African-American performers’ physical presence abroad—would in the years leading up to WWII transform itself into efforts to build political and affective alliances across national boundaries as well as in open, sometimes scathing, social critiques. An emergent "cold war" and related decolonization struggles in the immediate postwar era endowed matters of racial justice formal legitimacy and weight within an already precarious geopolitical balance. As a direct result, African-American and other non-white performers were actively sought after as key players within a range of State Department-orchestrated cultural diplomacy and propaganda efforts designed to replace varied, often complex representations of U.S. racial realities with a kindlier, gentler, free market-friendly image of U.S. race relations abroad. The Harlem Globetrotters were one of the key groups the State Department turned to in its effort to place images of interracial harmony in the service of promoting free market values (i.e. “the American way”) abroad during the early Cold War era. Founded in 1927, this barnstorming troupe’s unique blend of minstrelsy, vaudeville and sport made it unique in relation both to prior efforts of African-American performers to build transnational alliances as well as other contemporary performers whose presence abroad was sanctioned, and often sponsored, by the U.S. government. My paper proceeds as an effort to better understand the sporting component of this triad.
The Harlem Globetrotters' status as sport not only situated their brand of spectacle in close proximity to the martial, expansionist values of U.S. empire, but their scripted, systematic defeat of physically powerful white males seemed to invert and ridicule race based hierarchies and power relations which had gone unquestioned just a few years before. Using oral histories, newspaper accounts and archival records my paper will use the Harlem Globetrotters’ story to examine how African-American public opinion makers made sense of sport as an expression of black aspirations in a postwar international arena dominated by the spectre of interracial competition. After situating African-American international presence in sport against the backdrop of decolonization struggles and the related proliferation of media markets and technologies, I will discuss how, to what degree, and with what implications black elites' vision of a sport based black internationalism echoed and diverged from more official Cold War era cultural policymaking agendas.
MAUREEN MAHON
Department of Anthropology and African American Studies Program, University
of California, Los Angeles
Professor Maureen Mahon is a cultural anthropologist with research interests in African American culture; the aesthetics and political economy of media and popular culture; the social construction of race; and the intersection of race, gender, class, and sexuality. Her research examines the ways in which people use everyday discourses and social practices as well as symbolic forms like music as modes of self-expression and identity construction that challenge and reproduce meanings, especially those associated with categories of race in the United States and throughout the African Diaspora. Professor Mahon's book, Right To Rock: The Black Rock Coalition and the Cultural Politics of Race, will be published by Duke University Press, fall 2004. Right To Rock is an ethnographic analysis of the ways black American rock musicians use music and activism to challenge institutionalized discourses about black identity and cultural production. In addition to her work on Eslanda Goode Robeson, from which her conference presentation is drawn, Professor Mahon is working on an ethnography of contemporary African Americans who live in Paris, France, and on a cultural history of African-American women in rock'n'roll.
"Eslanda Goode Robeson: Anthropologist, Pan-Africanist, and Public Intellectual"
Although best known as the wife of world-renowned singer, actor, and activist Paul Robeson, Eslanda Goode Robeson was a scholar and activist in her own right. During the 1940s, she emerged as an outspoken critic of U.S. race relations and a proponent of African independence. In speeches presented at YWCA's, public libraries, churches, and schools and in articles published in the Negro and left press, Eslanda Goode Robeson linked two of the most important issues of her era--race relations in the United States and colonialism around the world. She argued that in the wake of World War II, the people who had been subjugated by racism and colonization were moving inexorably toward freedom and independence and insisted that it was time for real democracy to take hold in both the U.S. and internationally. This paper traces the intellectual trajectory that took Robeson from anthropological studies in London to anthropological research in Southern and Eastern Africa during the 1930s to a new role as a racial spokesperson and public intellectual in the U.S. during the 1940s. Using examples from the speeches she made in a 16-city U.S. lecture tour in 1947, her book African Journey (1945) and her pamphlet What Do the People of Africa Want? (1945), I demonstrate how her contacts with people of African descent in England and Africa and her study of social anthropology led her to develop a pan-African consciousness. This diasporic perspective informed her approach to the so-called Negro Problem in the U.S. and contributed to her concern with securing political and social equality for the millions of people who comprised "The Colored World."
JAMES A. MILLER
Professor, American Studies and English; Director, Africana Studies, George
Washington University
Professor James Miller's publications include Harlem: The Vision of Morgan and Marvin Smith (University of Kentucky Press, 1997) and Approaches to Teaching Wright's Native Sons (Modern Languages Association, 1997). He is co-author with Susan D. Pennybacker and Eve Rosenhaft of "Mother Ada Wright and the International Campaign to Free the Scottsboro Boys, 1931-1934" (American Historical Review 2001). Professor Miller is currently at work on a book project, The Moment of Scottsboro.
"'Think Globally, Act Locally; Think Locally, Act Globally:' The Scottsboro Case Travels Everywhere"
The celebrated and notorious Scottsboro case of the 1930s was a watershed moment in global understandings of American racial politics. The spectacle of the racial misery and victimization in the early years of the global Depression would not have necessarily attracted the attention of a world facing significant suffering of its own. What distinguished the Scottsboro case, however, was the rapidity with which news of the case traveled throughout the world and the extent to which public interest in it was sustained throughout the 1930s. This was due, in large measure, not only to the existence of political networks already in place, but also to the concerted efforts of the families, friends, and sympathizers of the Scottsboro defendants themselves. "Think Globally, Act Locally; Think Locally, Act Globally" examines the global dynamics of the campaign to free the Scottsboro Boys, paying particular attention to the travels of Ada Wright, the mother of two of the Scottsboro defendants, to Europe to publicize the plight of her sons.
KELLY QUINN
Ph.D. Candidate, American Studies, University of Maryland
Kelly Quinn is completing a dissertation entitled Making Modern Homes: A History of Langston Terrace Dwellings, A New Deal Community in Washington, D.C. Currently in residence as a Smithsonian Fellow at the Archives of American Art, Quinn has also been the recipient of a dissertation fellowship from the American Association of University of Women. Her publications include "Planning History/Planning Race, Gender, Class, and Sexuality" (Journal of Planning History, 2002) and "Endeavors and Expectations: Housing Washington's Women" in Embodied Utopias: Gender, Social Change, and the Modern Metropolis, ed. Amy Bingaman, Lisa Sanders and Rebecca Zorach (Routledge, 2002).
"The Wrecked Continent of Europe as Laboratory for Hilyard R. Robinson: Toward a History of African American Modernism in the United States and Abroad"
In the early part of the 20th century, many social reformers embraced the promise of modern architecture and urban planning in an effort to transform the built environment of their communities. For many in the United States and abroad, European architects, planners, and artists led the way in introducing innovative architectural forms and construction methods. Some architects carefully studied the European avant-garde design movements–especially the Weimar Republic’s Bauhuas, Holland’s De Stijl movement, and Vienna’s massive state-funded housing campaigns—by consulting the glossy black and white images in architectural magazines and periodicals. In architecture schools gripped by the conservative design and teaching principles of Beaux-Arts Classicism, students spoke of modern architecture among themselves in hushed whispers in informal conversations. For passionate disciples of modernism, a tour of European programs released their imagination from the confines of traditional design solutions espoused by the majority of the architectural profession; it also offered the chance to observe design solutions that promised to ameliorate poverty and to reorder daily life for generations to come. For these reformers, modern housing promised liberation. In 1931, Hilyard Robinson and his wife, Josephine, embarked on a study program; they moved to Berlin for 18 months and toured western, northern, central Europe and into Russia. The Robinsons made pilgrimages to the various architectural and planning monuments; armed with a camera, Hilyard Robinson made a photographic record of their trip. To Robinson, "[T]he wrecked continent [of Europe]…serve[d] as a laboratory" for future projects that he would build on behalf of African America.
Hilyard Robinson, a native Washingtonian and race man, trained at such prestigious institutions as M Street High School, Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Arts, University of Pennsylvania, and Columbia University before his tenure at University of Berlin. Yet, despite this considerable academic vitae, he considered his travel experiences as offering the most profound educational opportunities. Robinson's term in Germany, at the twilight of the Weimar Republic, emboldened his architectural imagination. I explore details of this trip to understand better Robinson's architectural practice, his professional and intellectual commitments, and his theories of race and class in the United States. Drawn from my dissertation, which advances a history of modern housing built by and for African Americans at Langston Terrace Dwellings in Northeast Washington, D.C., this paper challenges current architectural and planning histories that offer little, if any, discussion of race and racial politics with respect to modernism, while tracing the influence of an international movement on this elite design professional. I maintain that Robinson's European travels heavily shaped his practice and his politics.
JULIUS S. SCOTT
Department of History and Program in Afroamerican and African Studies,
University of Michigan
Professor Julius Scott's research focuses on the Caribbean world in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries; slavery and emancipation; and the Haitian Revolution and its impact in Afro-America. Among his publications are "Afro-American Sailors and the International Communication Network: The Case of Newport Bowers," in Jack Tar in History: Essays in the History of Maritime Life and Labour, ed. Colin Howell and Richard Twomey (1991) and "Crisscrossing Empires: Ships, Sailors, and Resistance in the Lesser Antilles in the Age of Revolution," in The Lesser Antilles in the Age of European Expansion, ed. R.L. Paquette (1996). Professor Scott's research project, The Common Wind: Currents of Afro-American Communication in the Era of the Haitian Revolution, explores networks of communication as crucial dimensions of Afro-diasporic politics and identity, demonstrating the level of ideological debate and international organization that existed among African Americans in the New World during the age of revolution.
"Travel and the Origins of the Black Atlantic"
Drawing upon diverse forms of eighteenth century "travel narratives," I will develop some of the ways by which the modern African Diaspora became defined and the central role of movement within those definitions.
RHONDDA THOMAS
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of English, University of Maryland
Rhondda Thomas is a Pre-doctoral fellow at the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the African Diaspora, University of Maryland. She is completing a dissertation, Exodus: Literary Migrations of Afro-Atlantic Authors, 1760-1903, which explores the Diasporan nature of the biblical Exodus as exhibited in the Afro-Atlantic Exodus tradition.
"Piety, Performativity and the Politics of Freedom in the 18th Century Atlantic World: Briton Hammon—from Negro Man to Englishman"
In his Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon, A Negro Man (1760), Briton Hammon, a well traveled sailor, demonstrates how the deliberate appropriation of familiar biblical narratives, particularly his deviation from and reconstruction of the storylines, enabled him to exploit his racial difference and connect with his devout white readers in colonial New England and Europe. By augmenting his spiritual narrative with a tale of his Joseph experience in a Cuban prison and his miraculous escapes at sea, Hammon performed himself into the world of increasingly powerful European empires, claiming his right to be recognized as an Englishman at a time when Afro-Atlantic people were frequently relegated to the margins.
The Joseph narrative was particularly important for eighteenth-century Afro-Atlantic writers, for it is a story of triumph over betrayal. Jealous brothers sold a favored sibling into slavery; however, the young man providentially encountered benefactors in Egypt who eventually led him out of bondage and into the second highest position in the land. This physical and spiritual journey transformed Joseph into a respected ruler in a foreign land but he never forsook his religion, culture or people. In the eighteenth century, Christianity provided the script for some people of African descent to perform their way into the Atlantic World. Hammon exemplifies Afro-Atlantic writers’ embrace of Christianity as a passport for citizenship. When he described the lowest point of his 13-year journey—locked in a close dungeon in Cuba for refusing to serve in the Spanish militia—Hammon evoked the Joseph narrative to depict his transformation from prisoner to Englishman. The British captain who rescued Hammon informed his former captors that he would never turn over an Englishman to the Spaniards, one of Britain’s arch rivals. Hammon attributed his miraculous deliverances during his Atlantic odyssey to the irrefutable workings of Providence. Like Joseph in Egypt, Hammon’s physical and spiritual journey enabled him to fashion a new identity as an Englishman who embodied many of the characteristics the English valued in their citizens. Though the captain recognized him as an Englishman, Hammon is identified as a "Negro man" in the title of his pamphlet suggesting that he, too, would not or could not forget his people or his culture
PENNY M. VON ESCHEN
Associate Professor, Department of History and Program in Afroamerican
and African Studies, University of Michigan
Professor Penny Von Eschen is author of Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957 (Cornell, 1997), which was awarded the Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. Race Against Empire draws connections between independence movements in Africa and Asia and African Americans' struggles in the U.S. for political, economic, and civil rights. Professor Von Eschen has just completed a study of African American cultural production in an international framework that looks at African Americans, jazz culture, and Cold War diplomacy. Satchmo Blows Up The World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War will be published by Harvard University Press in fall 2004.
"The Goodwill Ambassador: Duke Ellington and Black Worldliness"
In late August of 1971, while preparing to tour the Soviet Union for the U.S. Department of State, the celebrated American composer and band-leader Duke Ellington told reporters for the Evening Star: “After the Russian tour, We have our regular European concert tour, and then after that we go to South America and then we come back to the Rainbow Grill in New York, then to Japan and the Orient, then to Australia, New Zealand, and then we’ll come back and probably catch another blizzard in Buffalo.” As he went on in the interview to reject for the umpteenth time, the category of jazz, Ellington concluded, “I live in this music and this is the world.” Ellington was certainly a traveler and an international figure long before his first State Department sponsored tour; but in this paper I want to suggest that Ellington’s extraordinarily expansive sense of “the world” was in no small way shaped by his experiences as a goodwill ambassador. Between his first government-sponsored tour through the Middle East in 1963 and his death in 1974, Ellington toured the Soviet Union, made two trips to the continent of Africa, and toured South America and South Asia. The tours expanded the boundaries of Ellington’s world in a remarkable and perhaps unparalleled way. Not only did Ellington tour for the State Department more than any other musician, but the tours took him to places that would simply not have been possible -- not commercially viable, nor politically or logistically negotiable -- without government sponsorship. Ellington had long resisted attempts on the part of white critics to define what was good or authentic black music. Insisting that “the music of my race is something more than the American idiom, he resisted the mainstream appropriation of what he thought of as “the music of my people.” Ironically, the State Department tours gave Ellington an unprecedented opportunity and authority to carry out on a world stage, his fight against the critics attempt to define and appropriate black culture, even as he relished his role as ambassador. And the constant scrutiny of the category of jazz by one of the undisputedly greatest “jazz” ambassadors would shape his sensibilities as an ambassador. The tours also shaped Ellington’s deepening sense of Afro-diasporic ties. Representing the State Department at the First World Festival of Negro Arts, held in Dakar, Senegal in April of 1966, Ellington experienced the festival as an affirmation of African diasporic ties. He would return to the African continent for the State Department in 1973 to perform in Ethiopia and Zambia.
WORK-IN-PROGRESS SESSION
On Saturday morning we will have a special session presenting the work-in-progress of University of Maryland graduate students working on some aspect of African American identity travel. Each presenter will take 10 minutes to discuss their research ideas, followed by audience discussion and comment to assist them while they are at these beginning stages of their work. The presenters and their projects are:
Herbert Brewer, History, University of Maryland
"Making Africa, Making African America, 1790-1840"
From as early as the American Revolution, black people in North America organized and agitated to emigrate from the United States to Africa. In Boston, a group of black residents petitioned the Massachusetts General Court for funds to travel to Africa. Almost half a century later, blacks gathered in Philadelphia to debate the pros and cons of migrating to West Africa. Within that fifty year period, African American attitudes about their American home and their African identity underwent profound changes, shaped partly by large scale revolutionary social, political, economic and cultural processes underway in the wider Atlantic world of which they formed an indispensable part. I want to explore those changes and examine how the movement of African American people around the Atlantic world in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and their representations of Africa and African colonization in particular, helped to shape and shift the debates surrounding their emerging racial and national identities. I would focus on the writings of free black Americans who were interested in migrating to West Africa and who visited West Africa between 1790 and 1840 with the intention of establishing a black republic. This would require examining Black Protestantism and Black Republicanism, two emerging ideologies that played a crucial role in the consolidation of a black national identity, as well as exploring the circuits of knowledge and network of communities that gave texture to the early black Atlantic. Additionally, I would consider the way in which, through their travel writing, a distinctive male subjectivity developed alongside and mutually reinforced the construction of a self-conscious trans-Atlantic black world.
Yvette Green Pittman, English, University of Maryland
"From Expatriation to Transnationalism: Faith Ringgold's The French Collection"
My prospective dissertation will examine how Faith Ringgold is in dialogue with literary authors and movements. Ringgold describes The French Collection as a novel with visual images to tell the story of Willia Marie’s life once she moved from the U.S. to Paris in the 1920’s. Willia Marie asks a rhetorical question central to the series’ storyline: “Isn’t that why I and so many negro artists have come to Paris—to get a chance to make magic, and find an audience for our art?” (131). I argue that the paintings in The French Collection are landmarks in Willia Marie’s journey to define her identity as a black female artist. The progress to this goal is marked by Willia Marie’s departure from being defined by black cultural stereotypes in order to embrace a hybrid cultural identity. First, she chooses art, or rather her career, over motherhood, which does not coincide with black cultural stereotypes. Willia Marie does retain some aspects of black culture in developing her identity, but her life abroad is essential to her embracing Paris, and great European artists, in her quest to define her self.
Laura C. Williams, English, University of Maryland
"J. Saunders Redding and Integration: Excising the Shadows of Race and Liberalism amid Cold War Politics"
My research on J. Saunders Redding explores how Redding’s early work depicts a move from liberalism to conservatism—a shift that allowed Redding to claim an “American” identity. A retracing of Redding’s intellectual journey, through his travels in both the U.S. and India, shows that he flirts with the Left, attempts to cover up this flirtation, and ultimately establishes himself as a New Liberal with an assimilationist position on race that the Black Arts Movement would come to reject. In fact, Redding secures his “American” identity through his account of his participation in a US-sponsored speaking tour in India (1953) in which he attempts to defend the treatment of blacks in the US against the “untruths” perpetuated by communist propaganda. Most current scholarship briefly invokes Redding as a “complex” figure—the unrelenting integrationist who insisted upon framing African-American life and literature within an American mosaic—and then promptly moves him to the periphery of Diasporan studies. However, this dismissal of Redding as a mere assimilationist is too simplistic. Redding belongs to the tradition of Ralph Ellison and others who fought for integration and recognition of their claim to an inheritance bequeathed by literary “fathers,” such as Eliot, Dostoevsky, and Faulkner. While Redding’s rejection of any notion of a Black Diaspora is problematic, a re-examination of Redding’s work in relation to Cold War politics and the New Liberal Movement makes it necessary for us to recognize him as a central and representational figure within Diasporan, as well as American, studies. Redding’s work at the beginning of the Cold War reveals his ambivalent struggle between left-wing politics and conservatism, a struggle that at its core was part of Redding’s attempt to secure civil rights and integration in the U.S. and therefore to claim an “American” identity.
Shaundra Thomas, English, University of Maryland
"World Without End: Race, Integration, and Black Literary Transnationalism, 1956-1998"
African American literary canon-makers have generally underassessed, misclassified, or found no place at all for black transnational narratives. This neglect can be traced to what I call a geographical protocol—the expectation that “authentic” African American literature is set either in U.S. or conventionally diasporan spaces such as Africa, the Caribbean, and Brazil. The priority given to narratives enacted on U.S. and diasporan terrain, along with the relative lack of attention paid to texts that venture beyond the perceived bounds of a black geography, are part and parcel of a larger reluctance to envision an African American literary tradition in global terms. The incongruity between canonical paradigms and transnational texts has kept us from fully recognizing the theories posed by such literature. In moving beyond U.S.-bound landscapes, transnational narratives encounter, as well as imagine, alternative modes of racial subjectivity and interracial interaction. My dissertation analyzes black transnational narratives published after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case, which made de jure segregation unconstitutional. The texts considered include Langston Hughes’s I Wonder as I Wander (1956), Toni Cade Bambara’s “The Sea Birds Are Still Alive” (1977), Andrea Lee’s Russian Journal (1981), and James Alan McPherson’s Crabcakes (1998). The selected texts are products of the authors’ travels to such places as Central Asia, Spain, Vietnam, the Soviet Union, and Japan. Each text attempts to use these non-U.S. and non-diasporan spaces to alter standard modes of racial identity and relations, as well as transform racialized narrative forms and strategies. Not merely travel accounts or texts set in foreign settings, these texts, I argue, theorize a reformation of black subjectivity through participation in international, interracial, and intercultural communities unavailable in the United States or spaces conventionally linked to an African diaspora. In this context of racial identity formation, I define a form of transnationalism represented by not only acts of travel and encounter, but also the act of return, the process of bringing “home” new ways of negotiating the U.S. color line(s). Such a transnationalism seeks to revise U.S. social customs of race, often on intimate levels and in ways that give new meaning to overused terms such as “integration.” Especially since Brown, black transnational narratives have theorized how de facto, or noncompulsory, forms of integration might be realized. If Plessy v. Ferguson (1898) made the customs of segregation a matter of law, then transnational narratives, I argue, seek ways to make Brown, a law of integration, a matter of custom.