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Black and White Women's Travel Narratives: Antebellum Explorations. By Cheryl J. Fish. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004. 200 pp. $59.95.
Reviewed by Lisa M. Logan, University of Central Florida
Using mobile subjectivity as her focus, Cheryl Fish analyzes travel narratives by three women of the Americas: Nancy Prince, Mary Seacole, and Margaret Fuller. This comparative project aims to uncover the meanings of travel for women who undertook journeys for the purposes of benevolent work or social reform rather than pleasure. Fish's choice of authors, texts, and genre situates her book within African American Studies, Women's Studies, American Studies, and the feminist project of recovering women writers ongoing since the 19705. For example, Fish notes that black women are often excluded from studies of women's travel narratives and that the literary canon of black women writers in antebellum America is almost exclusively centered on the slave narrative. Fish's recuperative approach places her subjects in conversation with contemporary issues of social justice, postcolonial and global cultural studies, transnational feminisms, and feminist theories of space and place.
Mobility generates the hybrid genre of the travel narrative and the...