Writing the Journey: June 1999

"Nancy Prince and the Politics of Mobility, Home and Diasporic (Mis)Identification"

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Sandra Gunning
University of Michigan
sgunning@umich.edu

How do we interpret the meaning of a 19th c black American struggle for self-determination that was also strongly intertwined with complex and contradictory impulses towards a cultural chauvinism, impulses that affirmed African-American indebtedness to concepts of Anglo-American nationalism and in some cases imperial aggression? In an effort to answer this question, I turn to a consideration of how gendered mobility, genre and discourses of citizenship function in the 1850s autobiography The Life and Travels of Mrs. Nancy Prince. Though it is an extremely sparse text, the Narrative presents Prince's successive quests for fulfillment as a migrant domestic worker, wife, overseas missionary and reformer, identities dependent on different political conditions of mobility, identities that reference the political ebb and flow of a black female authority often unevenly and precariously constructed. Journeying between Massachusetts, Russia and Jamaica, Nancy Prince occupies a transatlantic world marked by regional and intra-cultural tensions that result from black resistance to new world slavery, the disruptive effects of the Middle passage, as well as from American and European imperialism. It is within these larger frames that we must view Nancy Prince's determination to be a traveling subject, as well as her complicated negotiation of both her "Americanness," and her identification as a citizen of the black diaspora.

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Sandra Gunning
University of Michigan
sgunning@umich.edu

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Updated May 23, 1999