Black Atlas

Judith Madera’s Black Atlas: Geography and Flow in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature makes an exciting contribution to the nexus of literary studies and critical geography by showing how literature “serves as an important vehicle for ... understanding the operations of place as creative strategies for living” (5) and how we might use “process geography” to help open “the terms of analysis for the study of place in literature” (16). Madera also enriches our growing sense of how nineteenth-century African American literature “arranges geographical meaning” (2), and smartly recognizes that “Black geographical literature ... is the textual reclaiming and reconstituting of actual places” (12). While the book unfolds in roughly chronological order, Madera notes that the close readings offered in Black Atlas disrupt “ideas of black history as a march of progress, or a story of protest within a national frame” and “are not sequenced around a series of symbolic spaces” or “topical sites in black history” (2). She thus studies works by William Wells Brown, Martin Delany, James Beckwourth, Pauline Hopkins, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson in order to “locate and historicize ... the highly interstitial scope of placement blacks worked through—both materially and perceptually—in the United States” (3) and to highlight different “literary geographies” (17)

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