 African American Travel Writing and the Politics of MobilityPramod K. Nayar
Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 2009, vol. 16, issue 1, 1-20 Abstract: This article examines a 19th-century travel narrative by an African-American woman, Nancy Prince, and identifies three principal rhetorical modes in her narrative: mobility, labour and community. It suggests that Prince's rhetoric of mobility consists of a mobility of poverty, when she moved from one place to another due to her straitened circumstances, and a mobility of agency, when she travelled as a means to assert her individuality, but within specific ‘structures of travel’. Prince's rhetoric of labour gives her agency as an individual when she undertakes ethnographic information-gathering and maps her own suffering. Labour, like mobility, helps her demonstrate an individual self. Finally, the rhetoric of community aligns Prince with the evangelical movement. Her agency as a black person becomes iconic of the transformation of her race itself—through the choice of a career and the practice of a profession outside the USA. This rhetoric takes her narrative out of the mere category of travel writing into one about community-building and racial identity. Date: 2009 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:indgen:v:16:y:2009:i:1:p:1-20 DOI: 10.1177/097152150801600101 Access Statistics for this article More articles in Indian Journal of Gender Studies from Centre for Women's Development Studies |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.