Abstract
In Freedom Beyond Confinement, Michael Ra-Shon Hall reminds us that the history of travel for African Americans has been experienced as a paradox of mobility and confinement. Beginning with the captivity of the trans-Atlantic slave ship to the forced migrations and plantation-stasis of enslavement, from Jim Crow segregation to the Great Migration, Black Americans have experienced mobility and immobility often, paradoxically, at the same time. This contradiction of (im)mobility has also frequently extended to when African Americans travelled beyond the confines of the nation. Historians, sociologists, and geographers working within the new mobilities paradigm have begun to trace this paradox. This book, with its focus on the “imagination” of Black travel, is an important addition to a growing field. Its focus on literary art serves as a useful companion to Mia Bay's expansive Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance (Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 2021).
Because Black mobility is often paradoxical, Black imagining of travel has aimed to resolve the contradiction of being an (im)mobile people in a nation that celebrates movement as one of the ultimate expressions of freedom. Black travel literature, whether it is fiction or non-fiction, has had to address both “the perils and possibilities of mobility” (p. 11). Black literature presents an opportunity, then, to understand how imagining travel highlighted potential problems but also offered strategies and solutions for Black Americans.
Hall begins his book with an overview of some prominent and not so prominent Black travellers as they moved around the globe during the nineteenth century and reflected on both the greater freedom they felt, the racism they experienced, and their own subjectivity as Black travellers. Hall also includes a concise and convincing take on the phenomenon of White “slumming” or voyeurism and the “performative stasis” through which White Americans have viewed Black culture (p. 28). In doing so, Hall sets up the argument that will drive this book: Black travel literature should not be understood within a dialectic of freedom and confinement but as a mutually constitutive imaginative space that offers Black Americans resources to navigate the world.
Freedom Beyond Confinement is rooted in literary theory and moves chronologically to trace the imaginative and real spaces of Black travel. Its first and last chapters bookend the monograph by exploring non-fiction responses to travel restrictions. The first chapter examines the Black press’ responses to discrimination and restriction between the end of Reconstruction (1877) and the 1960s, while the last focuses on The Negro Motorist Green Book (1936–66) and recent artistic responses to it. In between these two points Black authors, playwrights, and poets, such as Langston Hughes, Sterling A. Brown, Zora Neale Hurston, Octavia Butler, Calvin A. Ramsey, and Andrea Lee, navigate the world of travel both within and occasionally outside the United States. Through this book, Hall makes clear that Black mobility was shaped not only by racial restrictions but also by gendered ideas of who can be mobile. For artists like Zora Neale Hurston, their work grappled with moving beyond the gendered nature of Black travel in which Black men were viewed to be on the move with Black women supporting this mobility through their domesticity and stasis in the home. As Hall notes, through Hurston's travel and critical fiction, she repeatedly challenged this disproportionate mobility. In these ways, Hall traces the gendered and raced manifestations of mobility for Black Americans across the twentieth century.
Hall locates his argument in the spatial turn of the 1990s but does not engage with the recent scholarship on the role of mobility in the construction of race. For scholars of mobility, this may represent a missed opportunity to start a deeper conversation between literary studies and mobility studies. However, what is perhaps the most frustrating element of what is otherwise an excellent book is that Hall does not do more with the material at hand. Many chapters end with concluding digressions on another literary figure or artist that further adds to the argument but the reader wonders why these artists, authors, novels, and artworks were not better integrated into the chapter and given more sustained analysis.
That said, historians of transport will find much that interests them. Given its centrality to Black life in the late-nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, cultural production centred on the railroad receives a fair amount of coverage in the first few chapters but goes beyond the usual artistic focus on blues and jazz. In most other instances, the method of transport fades into the background of Hall's account with the exception of a good section on the lack of technology in Octavia Butler's time-travel novel, Kindred (1979). However, the most important contribution to the history of transport is Hall's insistence to look at imaginative responses to travel as much as its actual experience to understand the construction of a mobile Black subjectivity. With this book, Michael Ra-Shon Hall has provided a solid starting point for future studies on Black travel.