Moving Home: Gender, Place, and Travel Writing in the Early Black Atlantic

by Sandra Gunning

Overview

In Moving Home, Sandra Gunning examines nineteenth-century African diasporic travel writing to expand and complicate understandings of the Black Atlantic. Gunning draws on the writing of missionaries, abolitionists, entrepreneurs, and explorers whose work challenges the assumptions that travel writing is primarily associated with leisure or scientific research. For instance, Yoruba ex-slave turned Anglican bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther played a role in the Christianization of colonial Nigeria. Sarah Forbes Bonetta, a formerly enslaved girl "gifted" to Queen Victoria, traveled the African colonies as the wife of a prominent colonial figure and under the protection of her benefactress. Alongside Nancy Gardiner Prince, Martin R. Delany, Robert Campbell, and others, these writers used their mobility as African diasporic and colonial subjects to explore the Atlantic world and beyond while they negotiated the complex intersections between nation and empire. Rather than categorizing them as merely precursors of Pan-Africanist traditions, Gunning traces their successes and frustrations to capture a sense of the historical and geographical specificities that shaped their careers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478021858
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	09/13/2021
Series:	Next Wave: New Directions in Women's Studies
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	280
File size:	8 MB

About the Author

Sandra Gunning is Professor of American Studies and Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, author of Race, Rape, and Lynching: The Red Record of American Literature, 1890–1912, and coeditor of Dialogues of Dispersal: Gender, Sexuality, and African Diasporas.

Table of Contents

Preface  ix
Acknowledgments  xvii
Introduction  1
1. Mary Seacole's West Indian Hospitality  23
2. Home and Belonging for Nancy Prince  55
3. The Repatriation of Samuel Ajayi Crowther  86
4. Martin R. Delany and Robert Campbell in West Africa  120
5. Sarah Forbes Bonetta and Travel as Social Capital  160
Coda  197
Notes  205
Bibliography  227
Index  251

What People are Saying About This

Richard Yarborough

“In Moving Home, Sandra Gunning renders theoretically nuanced and historically informed readings of travel narratives that provocatively complicate our conceptions of Blackness in the nineteenth century. Gunning highlights how attending to the specificities of location, class, gender, religion, and ethnicity opens up startlingly fresh ways to analyze the literature of the period. In so doing, she has produced a bold and invigorating study that compels a new appreciation of the remarkable diversity of Black diasporic identities.”

Editorial Reviews

"An important corrective to dominant views of 19th-century Black identities and writings, as well as of travel writing, Gunning’s book will interest all scholars of literature and Black studies. Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty."
 

Choice - D. E. Magill

Sandra Gunning’s clear-sighted treatment of the complex political and social worlds in which her subjects found themselves and the multiple strategies through which they negotiated those worlds offers an especially important corrective to universalizing, homogenizing tendencies in much contemporary diasporic scholarship. Gunning argues for a new look at diaspora, particularly as a lens into the process of cultural change. Moving Home offers, in other words, provides a broad theory of the relationship of literature and literary criticism to profound social transformation.

Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative - Priscilla Wald

Moving Home takes a nuanced, intersectional approach to travel writers' construction of gendered identities. . . . Throughout her book, Gunning eschews generalization and accentuates instead the specific politics surrounding each text she discusses."

Review 19 - Elizabeth A. Bohls