Black Atlas

Geography and Flow in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature

Bibliographic Data

ID7307156
AuthorsMartha Schoolman (corresponding author)
Year2016
Volume103
Issue3
Pages754.2-755
Publication date2016-11-09
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of American History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314
PublisherOxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1093/jahist/jaw378
OpenAlexW2952316000
LanguageEN
Citations received7

It is a long-held principle of cultural studies that the African American experience of mobility in the West is structurally counterdiscursive. “The Black Atlantic,” as Paul Gilroy famously put it, is “a counterculture of modernity” (Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 1993, p. 1). In the spatial idiom that governs Gilroy's work, the locations of such structural contradiction are apparent: the slave ship is the obverse of the migrant ship; the mobile fugitive is the opposite of the person held fast on the plantation; European expatriation is the practical rejoinder to the demarcations of Jim Crow. Yet the more closely we examine these common binarisms, the more exceptional and distanced they become from the “both-ands” and “neither-nors” of everyday life and the sensuous complexities of aesthetic experience. Judith Madera's excellent Black Atlas enters this fertile field by reframing nineteenth-century African American literature in terms of a spatial practice characterized by the local, the tactical, and the provisional. Madera's subtitular pairing of “geography” and “flow” does not rest on a distinction between continent and ocean but rather on a tradition of “land writing” attentive to the possibilities of smaller-scale mobilities. As Madera writes

Art history · Contradiction · Cultural geography · Economic geography · Geography · Human geography · Modernity · American and British Literature Analysis · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Philosophy · Travel Writing and Literature

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