{"title":"Nancy Prince: Strategic (Re)mappings through Travel and Text","authors":"Ali Tal-mason","doi":"10.1080/08989575.2023.2221948","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Growing up in extreme poverty in Massachusetts, Nancy Gardner Prince (1799–1859) experienced migrancy and dislocation from an early age. In 1824, she emigrated to Russia for nearly a decade, and later emigrated to Jamaica for a brief period. As an African American author who journeyed widely in the United States and abroad, Prince’s writings reveal the racial discrimination and regulation that she endured while traveling in the US, as well as the impact that such restrictions on her freedom of movement had on her conceptions of racial kinship and national belonging. This essay approaches the regulation of Black mobility as a crucial site of racial dominance, subordination, and exclusion, and theorizes that Prince’s writings strategically remap the racially uneven conditions that she experienced on her journeys to articulate a counternarrative of Black citizenship and belonging in the US. Prince not only flips the script by publicly exposing racist conveyance operators, her autobiography also forms a counterarchive that records her ancestors’ oral histories of dispossession and US patriotism. Through close readings and attention to her revisions, we see that Prince’s engagements with territorial concepts such as “country” and “place” contemplate the tensions inherent in African American identity during the antebellum nineteenth century, as they disclose the complex negotiations that shaped her travels and texts.","PeriodicalId":37895,"journal":{"name":"a/b: Auto/Biography Studies","volume":"31 1","pages":"507 - 523"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2023-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"a/b: Auto/Biography Studies","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2023.2221948","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"Arts and Humanities","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Abstract Growing up in extreme poverty in Massachusetts, Nancy Gardner Prince (1799–1859) experienced migrancy and dislocation from an early age. In 1824, she emigrated to Russia for nearly a decade, and later emigrated to Jamaica for a brief period. As an African American author who journeyed widely in the United States and abroad, Prince’s writings reveal the racial discrimination and regulation that she endured while traveling in the US, as well as the impact that such restrictions on her freedom of movement had on her conceptions of racial kinship and national belonging. This essay approaches the regulation of Black mobility as a crucial site of racial dominance, subordination, and exclusion, and theorizes that Prince’s writings strategically remap the racially uneven conditions that she experienced on her journeys to articulate a counternarrative of Black citizenship and belonging in the US. Prince not only flips the script by publicly exposing racist conveyance operators, her autobiography also forms a counterarchive that records her ancestors’ oral histories of dispossession and US patriotism. Through close readings and attention to her revisions, we see that Prince’s engagements with territorial concepts such as “country” and “place” contemplate the tensions inherent in African American identity during the antebellum nineteenth century, as they disclose the complex negotiations that shaped her travels and texts.
期刊介绍:
a /b: Auto/Biography Studies enjoys an international reputation for publishing the highest level of peer-reviewed scholarship in the fields of autobiography, biography, life narrative, and identity studies. a/b draws from a diverse community of global scholars to publish essays that further the scholarly discourse on historic and contemporary auto/biographical narratives. For over thirty years, the journal has pushed ongoing conversations in the field in new directions and charted an innovative path into interdisciplinary and multimodal narrative analysis. The journal accepts submissions of scholarly essays, review essays, and book reviews of critical and theoretical texts as well as proposals for special issues and essay clusters. Submissions are subject to initial appraisal by the editors, and, if found suitable for further consideration, to independent, anonymous peer review.