African American travel narratives from abroad : mobility and cultural work in the age of Jim Crow / Gary Totten.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Totten, Gary.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--African American authors--History and criticism.

American literature.

American literature--African American authors.

Travelers' writings, American--History and criticism.

Travelers' writings, American.

Travel writing--History--19th century.

Travel writing.

History.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

History.

Physical Description:

ix, 170 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press, 2015.

Summary:

During the Jim Crow era, African American travelers faced the prospects of violence, harassment, and the denial of services, especially as they made their way throughout the American South. Those who journeyed outside the United States not only found a political and social context that was markedly different from America's, but in their international mobility they also discovered new ways of identifying themselves in relation to others. In this book, Gary Totten examines the global travel narratives of a diverse set of African American writers, including Ida B. Wells, Booker T. Washington, Matthew Henson, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Zora Neale Hurston. Totten demonstrates how these travelers and their writings challenged dominant ideologies about African American experience, expression, and identity in a period of escalating racial violence. By setting these texts in their historical context and within the genre of travel writing, Totten presents a nuanced understanding of both popular and recovered work of the period. Book jacket.

Contents:

Embodying segregation: Ida B. Wells on the antilynching circuit

Southernizing travel in the Black Atlantic: Booker T. Washington's The man farthest down

"To return and tell the tale of the doing": Matthew Henson and the African American explorer's identity

Cultural work, disorderly mobility, and the mundane realities of travel: Jessie Redmon Fauset and the crisis

Bodies of knowledge: cultural authority and black female mobility in Zora Neale Hurston's Tell my horse.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781625341617

162534161X

9781625341600

1625341601

OCLC:

898221725