English Language and Literature Commons^™

Searching For "Free Territory" In Saidiya Hartman's Lose Your Mother, Tisha Brooks

SIUE Faculty Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity

This essay locates Saidiya Hartman’s travel and writing in relationship to a longer and multifaceted legacy of black travel that includes the forced/coerced movement of black people across the Atlantic during the slave trade, the migratory travel of black diasporic peoples, and African American tourism to Africa, Ghana in particular. This essay argues that Hartman's text challenges us to build bridges across the boundaries we often construct between these various types of movement, enabling us to see the ways in which these journeys intersect in tenuous ways. Pushing beyond narrow definitions of travel, this essay questions singular frameworks that focus …