Black Travel Writing

What does it mean for Black diasporic writers to travel to Africa? Focusing on the period between the 1990s and 2010s, Isabel Kalous examines autobiographical narratives of travel to Africa by African American and Black British authors. She places the texts within the long tradition of Black diasporic engagement with the continent, scrutinizes the significance of Black mobility, and demonstrates that travel writing serves as a means to negotiate questions of identity, belonging, history, and cultural memory. To provide a framework for the analyses of contemporary narratives, her study outlines the emergence, development, and key characteristics of the multifaceted genre of Black travel writing. Authors discussed include, among others, Saidiya Hartman, Barack Obama, and Caryl Phillips.

Isabel Kalous is an alumna of the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture at the University of Giessen, Germany, where she completed her dissertation in English and American Literature in 2020. Her research interests include African American literature, slavery and cultural memory, transnational American studies, and cultural mobility studies.