While study of African American travel has gained steady momentum in the wake of the 1990s spatial turn in the interdisciplinary humanities, attention to travel continues to be eclipsed by studies of enslavement and migration.
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Further, creative works inspired by experiences of enslavement and migration are likewise substantial and better understood relative to travel, with notable examples such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and Edmonia Lewis’s Forever Free (1867) or William Attaway’s Blood on the Forge (1941) and Jacob Lawrence’s Migration series (1940-1941).
Relative to travel, studies of enslavement and migration are so voluminous that each has its own organizing metaphor, the “Middle Passage” and “Great Migration,” particularly useful in framing narratives of the enslaved and migrant. The cultural history of African American mobility includes experiences of enslavement, migration, and travel.
What drew you to focus your research on travel and imagination in African American letters and cultural history?
In this interview, author Michael Ra-shon Hall reflects on bringing together his interests in the lived experience of African Americans and literary fiction. Using the paradox of freedom and confinement to frame the ways travel represented both opportunity and restriction for African Americans, Freedom Beyond Confinement, the latest in Clemson University Press’s African American Literature series, examines the cultural history of African American travel and the lasting influence of travel on the imagination from post Reconstruction (ca.