Women at Sea

Women at Sea: Travel Writing and the Margins of Caribbean Discourse emphasizes the importance of women’s travel narratives, once regarded as superficial in comparison with men’s travelogues, as essential documentary sources for understanding the society and transculturation of the Caribbean. The collection of essays in this anthology addresses two questions rarely posed in the growing academic research on travel writing, gender, and colonialism. First, how can an analysis of the exploration of women’s travel and travel writing be broadened to include those who traveled on the socioeconomic perimeter of colonial societies? Second, what form do these travelers and their chronicles resemble? The contributors answer these inquiries through their critical examination of female travelers who were uneducated, enslaved, or maniacal, and whose presence and/or published works have therefore remained on the periphery of Latin American travel literature.The contributions are arranged in chronological order, beginning with European colonialism and ending with the modern era. These include a wide array of subjects such as women “recovered” from history such as the black “oracle” La Mora de Hornachos, recounted in Cabeza de Vaca’s Castaways, which predicted calamity for his doomed sixteenth-century expedition. The contemporaneous accounts and modern literature concerning the adventures of eighteenth-century pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read underscore the social and cultural tensions arising from their refusal to conform to traditional gender identities. The social and political implications of the odyssey of the slave Mary Prince, exemplified in The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave (1831), are examined in the context of the British abolition movement. The personal transformation that led African American dancer Katherine Dunham to integrate the religious cosmology and rituals of Vodún into her work are studied in relation to Dunham’s recollections of Haiti in Island Possessed (1969).At the core of all these narratives is the Caribbean region, known for its cultural diversity, multilingualism, ethnic heterogeneity and disparate nationalism. The heroic journey of Jamaican creole Mary Seacole, the self-described “female Ulysses” in her 1857 narrative, represents the dilemma of being discriminated against as the “Other” by the English while at the same time internalizing the cultural superiority accorded to an “English lady.” The intrepid and strong-willed Mrs. Seacole, who served as a nurse during the Crimean War, denounces the injustices suffered by people of color while refers to black servants as “niggers.” The historical reconstruction of the Trinidadian Céline Alvarez Baa, who rescued the unstable Adèle Hugo in Barbados in 1871, as a “black mammy figure” and “Jezebel” in contemporary and present literature obliterates Alvarez Baa’s courageous action in returning Adèle to her father Victor Hugo.The themes of national identity, race, modernism, women’s rights, and North American capitalism are explored through the letters, poetry, and observations of Cuban and Puerto Rican women in exile. These include Cuba’s Countess de Merlin’s Viaje a la Habana (Voyage to Havana, 1844) and Aurelia Castillo de González’s Un paseo por América (A Voyage to America, 1895), in addition to the nineteenth-century newspapers articles written by Puerto Rico’s leading female literary figure Lola Rodríguez de Tío. These women often present the political and social construction of nationhood, race, and gender relations in Cuba and Puerto Rico, respectively, in the form of letters, replete with personal experiences of exile.African American anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston’s classic travelogue/ethnography, Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti (1938) represents a critique of the socioeconomic restrictions faced by women under decolonization while viewing writing as a form of social action. Written after the U. S. occupation of Haiti (1915–34) ended, Hurston’s work is a corrective to previous travel writings on Haiti such as William Seabrook’s The Magic Island (1929) that presents Haiti as a superstitious nation redeemed by the American occupation. Hurston uses ethnography to criticize prevailing views on decolonization through the rhetoric of social protest.Women at Sea expands the present scholarly research on gender, race, and class in women’s travel writings in Latin America, such Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes (1994) and Majorie Agosín’s Magical Sites: Women Travelers in Nineteenth–Century Latin America (1999) by emphasizing the significance of nonwriting women. The contributors integrate a variety of primary and secondary sources in their essays, ranging from letters, autobiographies, newspaper articles, plays, and poetry. The essays reflect a lucid writing style though certain postmodern literary terms need more clarification. Women at Sea is beneficial to historians and students interested in the sociocultural and political aspects of women’s travelogues about Latin America

Adventure · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Colonialism · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Travel writing · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Gender Studies · History · Travel Writing and Literature

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