SOURCE: Fish, Cheryl.“Voices of Restless (Dis)continuity: The Significance of Travel for Free Black Women in the Antebellum Americas.” Women's Studies 26 (1997): 475-95.

In the following essay, Fish explores how the mobility of Nancy Prince and Seacole, two free-born black women, helped to shape their identities and impacted the travel-narrative genre.

Travel, with its many bourgeois associations, might be a loaded term for African Americans in that it cannot be easily evoked to talk about the experience of the Middle Passage; for that reason, bell hooks often uses the term “journey” when she writes of the geographical and psychic mobility of African Americans.¹ This distinction draws attention to the slave experience as central to the literature of the African diaspora, and while acknowledging this centrality, I want to posit another significant, albeit linked, tradition that self-consciously shifts the focus from forced to chosen mobility. In thinking about the...