Black Travel Writing
                      






















   Langston Hughes and Caryl Phillips both did contemporary versions of the eighteenth-
century young gentleman’s Grand Tour of Europe, Africa, and the world.  Even the grand
quadrivium of African American ideologues – W. E. B. DuBois, Richard Wright, James
Baldwin, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. – packed their bags and embarked upon tours of the
world; but it was their travel to Africa that, in each of their cases, reoriented their
conceptions of civil society and its bumpy future, as the Senegalese scholar Babacar M’
Baye demonstrates in his analysis (in Black Travel Writing) of their post-Africa writings,
where suddenly there appears a far more complex image of race, identity, and the African
Diaspora than DuBois, Wright, Baldwin or Gates had before their travel to Africa transformed
their romantic notions of self, history, and home.  Their African writings are now mostly seen
as cultural criticism, manifestos, or political theory — not as travel writing per se.
  The collection of scholarly essays, Black Travel Writing, also contains present-day
assessments of tourism (from a black perspective).  African American travel writer Elaine
Lee, author of Go Girl! The Black Woman’s Book of Travel and Adventure (1997), has
compiled statistics on black travelers and the burgeoning business of attracting their
dollars by gearing the tourism to the interests of this particular clientele through themed
cruises to black historical sites and the like.  Maureen Stone, the black British author of
Black Woman Walking: A Different Experience of World Travel (2002), takes her readers
into regions that the tourist services seldom (or never) go; and she conveys an intimate
sense of intercultural contact still possible for the adventurous and politically conscious
woman walker. Some black travel writers, like Michael Caldwell, write about how American
blacks are perceived and pursued as foreigners on other soils — and about how young
cultures around the world have more in common than many who embark ever imagine
beforehand.
 The wide array of travel destinations and traveling experiences, authorial purposes,
narrative styles, and cultural implications of the writing we bundle into the generic category
black travel writing is staggering; yet, the genre, at a minimum, encompasses two
meaningful constancies: first, a first-person, non-fictional relation of the experience and
significance of travel; and, second, a racially-specific gaze. We might anticipate, therefore,
that black travel writing will always represent segments, at least, of the intimate life-writing
of black voyagers; but Kenneth Speirs’s essay on what is essentially a travel narrative, The
Life and Adventures of Nat Love, a black cowboy, counsels us to respect and to appreciate
the personal reticence of travel writers and to “read” that reticence in new and more
responsible, scholarly ways. Nat Love’s book has been deemed not “black” enough because
it is about the movements of a cowboy and not “Western” enough because it is about the
adventures of a former slave who became a successful, middle-class Pullman porter. What
hasn’t been recognized is the genre to which this “life-and-adventures” narrative really
belongs — and why identifying the code is essential to reading the work’s message. The Nat
Love narrative bears all the signs of travel writing (anecdotal, anthropological, geographical,
sociological), but it is travel writing camouflaged for a culturally specific purpose:  it is
meant to expose the specific ways and local customs of other places to an African
American readership, without seeming openly to advocate relocation or insurrection.





















That claim is perhaps dangerously broad, but it rests to a large degree on scholarly findings
first aired at Howard University in the spring of 2003, at the first international academic
conference to focus exclusively on travel writing by blacks around the world and through-
out history.
 Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano (also known as Gustavus Vassa), and Mary Prince, for
instance, traveled widely and reflected on the implications of their movements and
observations; but Wheatley’s travel writing looks on the surface more like classically
inspired odes to the ocean than anything else, Equiano’s book looks like a straightforward
narrative about slavery and the slave trade in the eighteenth-century and the process of
manumission, and Mary Prince’s book looks like a subaltern’s ironical reflections on the
domestic’s experience of her masters’ world travels. All the same, they are reflections on
various places around the world and about the process of getting (as a black traveler) from
geographical point A to geographical point B, and so on.
 Black-British scholar Florence Marfo has written a brilliant comparative study of three
texts:  Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, African American playwright Robert
Alexander’s 1996 theatrical take-off on Stowe’s novel (I Ain’t Yo’ Uncle), and Josiah
Henson’s emancipatory narrative, which actually informs both Stowe’s and Alexander’s
texts.  Marfo displays the political agenda of the white author who “conceived of and
elaborated [Uncle Tom] as a Black figure who would “go” nowhere: a non-traveling Black” in
every sense of the term; and Marfo shows how Henson’s text “provides readers with an
early Black American travel narrative — in both literal and figurative terms — that exposes
the ruses Blacks have often had to execute to travel to the Promised Land of freedom,
happiness and opportunity” (Marfo 100). Henson’s text, like so
many other works by former American and Caribbean slaves,
has been  seen by scholars as just a slave narrative.
Then, there is the case of Zilpha Elaw, the nineteenth-century
female evangelist who exhorted her readers to “walk worthy
. . . in this day of feverish restlessness and mighty movement”
(qtd. in Blockett,  104). Elaw’s Memoirs of the Life, Religious
Experience, Ministerial Travels and Labours of Mrs. Zilpha
Elaw, An American Female of Colour may not be immediately
recognizable as travel writing because its ostensible raison d’être was to argue that there
need be no distinction drawn between spirituality, labor, and progress. Elaw’s text details a
radical liberationist theology constructed upon the hegemonic discourses of her day, a
rhetoric which effectively exempted her from the day’s strictures against woman preachers
and the independent travel of women, especially of black women, in nineteenth-century
America.  Elaw’s book is a travel narrative — typical of black travel narratives — which not
only gives an account of extensive travel across the land but also provides lessons in how to
free oneself from the limitations imposed upon blacks by ingeniously utilizing the state’s
own ideological apparatuses as freedom’s keys. However, because of its obscurity, as
African American scholar Kimberly Blockett has argued, Mrs. Elaw’s travel narrative is not
yet acknowledged as a prototype of the genre’s – of travel writing’s - black-American,
nineteenth-century version.
 Mary Ann Shadd Cary was a black-American newspaper woman.  One of her major
achievements was her editorial writing about her travels in Western Canada, a project of
investigation aimed to help her readership assess the potential value of emigration to that
territory.  Her columns are travel writing in the guise of political and economic analysis; but
Shadd Cary was no glib advertiser of open real estate:  she weighed communities carefully
and responsibly, for (as she said) she did not want to be responsible for any person’s future
misery in a foreign land.  The black hegemonic becomes quite evident in her (1852) astute
critical descriptions of rural Canadian spaces. A close generic cousin would be the colonial
era British assessments of African resources and conditions, like Mary Kingley’s 1897
Travels in West Africa.
 I am inclined to agree with those scholars of travel writing who argue that (generally) travel
writing that is acknowledged as such serves some hegemonic power.  I would add that
when an account of the experience of travel represents an excursion which can be seen as
physical escape or intellectual migration or the inspiration for a subversive political
manifesto or eccentric personal essay, it is often classified some other way even though,
as cultural capital, it possesses equivalent valences to canonical travel writings through
the ages.
  Indeed, so far back do the accounts of travels by Africans reach
that scholars today must wrestle with complex textual
entanglements having to do with provenance, chains of
transmission, translations and re-translations, and editorial
emendation — and, even then, we cannot be certain just who wrote
what and who else had a hand in the packaging of this or that travel
narrative composed by an African sometime back in history.
Diodorus Siculus, for example, the first-century-B.C. Sicilian
historian, who wrote a multi-volume world history (in Greek) that
ends with Caesar’s Gallic Wars, gives us glimpses of traveling
Africans going back as far as the 4th century B.C., historical figures
mentioned by those much earlier chroniclers from whom Diodorus
Siculus borrowed freely.
  One of my colleagues, Alinda Sumers, has traced meticulously the
fortunes of Leo Africanus’s A Geographical History of Africa, a
sixteenth-century travel narrative  that comes down to us through
many hands, a text transformed through the ages by translators and
editors to further many successive and competing political agendas.
Leo Africanus first traveled across Africa as an adolescent
accompanying his father, a merchant and learned ambassador; in
his narrative, Leo Africanus “precisely describes the peoples,
customs, economic practices, architecture, deserts, mountains,
flora, fauna, as well as his adventures among the various city
kingdoms” (Sumers 12), but the commentary accompanying the
descriptions is of fascinatingly dubious authenticity. I invite you to
read Professor Sumers exemplary Renaissance scholarship in
Black Travel Writing, the collection of scholarly essays and original
travel narratives that I  edited as a special issue of BMa: The Sonia
Sanchez Literary Review (Vol.9: No.1, Fall 2003). This volume is the
focal point of my remarks here.
                Black Travel Writing: The Invisible Genre
                                             by
                                    R. Victoria Arana
     Professor of English and Comparative Literature Howard University

(Text of paper delivered at the American Comparative Literature Association’s Convention at
University Park, Pennsylvania, March, 2005. Revised April, 2006 for IABTW)
  From my research I've come to the conclusion that black
travel writing emerged (and perhaps especially in
America) in that sort of way:  as an encapsulated form
within a variety of brawnier popular genres of writing —
traders' chronicles, diaries, emancipatory narratives,
newspaper editorials (like Mary Ann Shadd Cary’s), tales
of the wild West (like Nat Love’s), gee-whiz life writing (like
Faith Adiele’s, Michael Caldwell’s and Elliott Hesters),
religious pamphleteering (like Zilpha Elaw’s), even fiction
(like Toni Morrison’s Paradise), science fiction (like
Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower), and so on —
genres that so effectively masked the authenticity of the
black travel reports that scholarship has been slow to
recognize the full extent and cultural efficacy of black
travel writing's primary purpose: to describe promising
destinations (for escape or relocation), to describe the
peoples and customs existing elsewhere and do so in a
way that could transform a reader’s sense of possibility,
both individual and collective, and offer new lives to
blacks who remained at the traveler's point of origin.
photo by Niambi Davis