Department of English
Writing the Journey: June 1999
"Where's A Homegirl to Go? Theorizing Journey in Black Women's Narratives"
Kim Blockett
University of Wisconsin
blockett@facstaff.wisc.edu
I will explore how 20th-century Black heroines travel and why. This paper examines the physical and psychological motivations for travel and seek out the far-reaching implications of these journeys. Beginning with the hypothesis that the journey for Black literary heroines is often a traumatic quest for identity, I investigate how traveling Black women become invisible migrants-- homeless or exiled as every space is limited by racial, sexual and economic boundaries. Thus, home, or the United states, is contested space in which the Black heroine lives in exile. Using a comparative analysis of Nella Larsen's Quicksand and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, this project posits that travel is theory and identifies the need for movement as a method to resist the trauma of hegemonic constructions of identity.
In an effort to further the current scholarship on the intersections of travel, theory, culture and locational identity, exciting interdisciplinary work is beginning to address how race and gender fit into modernist theories of space and time. In "Traveling Theory," Edward Said initiates a crucial investigation of the origins and movements of theoretical issues across cultures, locations, and time. Noted anthropologist James Clifford takes Said's notions of travel and theory and expands the vision to investigate the theorists themselves. Acknowledging the long association of travel and theory with the literary or recreational journeying of white males, Clifford asks "how do different populations, classes and genders travel? What kinds of knowledge, stories, and theories do they produce?" Both interrogations open up a "crucial research agenda" as neither of them engage issues of Black women, travel and identity.
My paper is an exploration of the ways in which Black heroines utilize travel to construct themselves. Edward Said asserts in "Traveling Theory" that "theory is the place in which disparate, apparently disconnected things are brought together in perfect correspondence" (314) However, he goes on to argue that theory moves from one place to another [and] is both a fact of life and a usefully enabling condition of intellectual activity. Such movement into a new environment is never unimpeded. It necessarily involves processes of representation and institutionalization different from those at the point of origin. This complicates any account of the transplantation, transference, circulation, and commerce of theories and ideas. (305) Likewise, if we conceptualize theory as travel, our movement re-visions and re-informs our selves and our homes in transformational ways. Said calls for critics to recognize "the extent to which theory is a response to a specific social and historical situation, of which an intellectual occasion is of course a part" (316). In other words, theory, like a traveler, comes from something; it has a material point of origin. Not only that, but travel implies a temporality of movement. Travelers stop at different points and eventually return home. So perhaps theory, too, is circular. It emerges from a material moment or origin, travels to the abstract where it is shaped and informed by other ideas, and returns home to be re-applied as it is most useful -- with succinct and different ways of seeing and knowing than when it left home. It returns to the same place, practice or event to inflect nuances and meaning.
Department of English
University of Wisconsin-Madison
600 N. Park St.
Madison, WI 53704
office: 608-263-1642
home: 608-263-8986
email: blockett@facstaff.wisc.edu
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