“Betwixt and Between”: Juanita Harrison’s Black Internationalist Practice

How to identify a historical subject whose lived practice was resistant to almost every fixed identity? This is the conundrum one faces when attempting to introduce Juanita Harrison. Perhaps the most effective introduction is found on the cover of her 1936 book, My Great, Wide, Beautiful World, an epistolary narrative covering eight restless years (1927–1935), which saw her traverse much of the globe, and her only volume of published writing. The dust cover of the Macmillan Company edition (the book’s original and most widely read version) is dominated by a bold typography, behind which, arranged in a jumble, are numerous photographs of the elusive author posing in different forms of dress. The design informs the reader that the narrator of this travel narrative can provide access to the interior of whatever culture she enters. The eclecticism of her dress and the commanding tone of the title—taken from a poem by nineteenth-century English writer W.B. Rands—clearly communicates a confidence in her mobility and her understanding of the alien social worlds that she allows the American reader to glimpse. Harrison’s nationality and her racial identity are not easily deciphered from any of these pictures, and on reading the text one has the sense that she had little interest in satiating any popular or market-based demand for identitarian certainty. One of the intriguing features of the text is its repeated resistance to the imposed categorization of Harrison and to any spatial or experiential limitations. Interpellated in the American context as Black, Harrison’s years of travel saw her use the ethnic ambiguity of her appearance to deceive and delight her acquaintances. This practice of “racial disidentification” is the focus of this reading of Harrison’s life, accessed primarily through her book. The term is borrowed from Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo, who has used it to