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Mobility, Skepticism, and Counter-storytelling in African American Travel Writing: Carl Rowan's South of Freedom

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2020

GARY TOTTEN
GARY TOTTEN*
Affiliation:
English Department, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Email: [email protected].
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Abstract

In South of Freedom (1952), Carl Rowan frames his travels through an investigation of the US South in terms of his doubts about cultural change, his safety, and whites’ and blacks’ willingness to participate in racial reform, among other things. His skepticism about improvements in race relations and his critique of the country's inadequate progress toward such goals inform his examination of various states of freedom and unfreedom existing in the United States. Rowan's narrative and specific descriptions of his and others’ mobility operate as instances of counter-storytelling that incorporate such skepticism and critique. Ultimately, his theorizing of modes of resistance to institutionalized racism through individual action serves as a model for understanding African American travel writing and mobility more generally.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 55 , Issue 4 , October 2021 , pp. 887 - 909
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2020

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References

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12 Hurston, Zora Neale's ethnographic practice as described in Tell My Horse (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1938)Google Scholar relies on this dialectic of mobility and stasis. For discussion of this aspect of her text see chapter 5 of Totten, Gary, African American Travel Narratives from Abroad: Mobility and Cultural Work in the Age of Jim Crow (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015)Google Scholar. For discussion of Rowan's navigation of southern space, see Totten, , “Geographies of Race and Freedom in Carl Rowan's South of Freedom,” in Zacharasiewicz, Waldemar, ed., Riding/Writing across Borders in North American Travelogues and Fiction (Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 2011), 169–83Google Scholar.

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24 Ibid., 2438, 2439, 2440. Narrative therapy, as theorized by Michael White, David Epston, and others, takes a similar approach to storytelling as resistance. By identifying or externalizing problematic stories of the dominant culture and other truth narratives that have oppressed them, individuals can re-author alternative stories, allowing previously unstoried aspects of their experience to be “performed … expressed [,] and circulated,” and thus challenge oppressive discourses and dominant ideologies. White, Michael and Epston, David, Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 30, 17Google Scholar.

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33 Delgado and Stefancic, Critical Race Theory, 9.

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40 Ibid., 36.

41 Wells, Ida B., Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, ed. Duster, Alfreda M. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1970)Google Scholar; Washington, Booker T., The Man Farthest Down: A Record of Observation and Study in Europe (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1912)Google Scholar. For further discussion of Ida B. Wells's and Booker T. Washington's travel writing, see Totten, African American Travel Narratives from Abroad, chapters 1 and 2.

42 Wright, Richard explored such concerns in a global context in travel texts such as Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos (New York: Harper, 1954)Google Scholar; The Color Curtain: A Report of the Bandung Conference (New York: World Publishing Co., 1956); Pagan Spain (New York: Harper and Row, 1957); and White Man, Listen! (New York: Doubleday, 1957). For essays exploring the themes of Wright's travel writing, see Richard Wright's Travel Writings: New Reflections, ed. Virginia Whatley Smith (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001).

43 Rowan, “Crisis in Civil Rights Leadership,” 37.