Homecomings
Black Women’s Mobility in Early African American Fiction
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6187680 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Anna Pochmara (0000-0002-8860-687X, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 15 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Publication date | 2020-06-23 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | European Journal of American Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1991-9336 • E-ISSN: 1991-9336 |
| Publisher | OpenEdition (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.4000/ejas.16001 |
| OpenAlex | W3039081950 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 39 |
In this article, I examine the patterns of black female mobility as represented in three African American mulatta novels: William Wells Brown’s Clotel (1853), Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Iola Leroy (1893), and Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins’s Hagar’s Daughter (1901-1902). First of all, I discuss their protagonists’ movement into bondage and forced travel resulting from the withdrawal of their father’s protection. Such imposed mobility is countered by the self-determined action undertaken by the black heroines not only to free themselves but also to reunite their families. As a result, their itineraries are circular rather than linear and frequently take the form of a homecoming. In contrast to the paradigm of the traditional slave narrative, which focuses on a single individual, the novels I analyze simultaneously follow two or three generations of family members. Such representations result in a chaotic aesthetics that successfully depicts the unpredictability of the fate of black families under slavery, and it foregrounds the relationality of the novels’ characters
Art · Genealogy · Literature · American and British Literature Analysis · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies
West of Everything
The politics of domesticity
Runaway Genres
The Coupling Convention
Making Men Moral
Dividing Lines
Uneasy Virtue
Domestic Allegories of Political Desire
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Mulattas and Mestizas
The Lost Sisterhood
Women in Chains
The Bonds of Womanhood
The Changing Same
The Altar at Home
Women in Chains
Passing and the Rise of the African American Novel
West of Everything
Poor Eliza
To Be Continued
Bodily Bonds
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |