The Jacobs Siblings’ Black Hemispheric Geographies

Abstract

The fourth chapter highlights the hemispheric imaginaries and sentimental skepticism of Harriet A. Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1862) and John S. Jacobs’s speeches and writings. The siblings challenge the North–South mapping of US slavery, instead embedding it in an East–West, antiracist, anti-imperial mapping that makes explicit the transamerican pressures shaping the dispossession of African Americans, Native Americans, and Mexicans. Their writings move not only along familiar abolitionist routes from South to North and the United States to Britain but also from North Carolina and New York to Florida, Haiti, Jamaica, California, and Mexico. As the foreclosure of Harriet’s journey to California at the end of Incidents suggests, however, transamerican sentimentalism here struggles to sustain even localized moments of connection. The Jacobs siblings’ writings highlight the challenges that complicate potential multiethnic, transnational alliances.