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Trafficking Subjects: The Politics of Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America

2006; Oxford University Press; Volume: 93; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/4486117

1945-2314

Cheryl J. Fish,

Colonialism, slavery, and trade

Trafficking Subjects draws on a wide range of genres and refers to a range of historically relevant struggles for social justice to fashion a metatheory of the politics of mobility in nineteenth-century America. Drawing on material that ranges from The Confessions of Nat Turner (1832) to works of fiction by Jack London, Edgar Allan Poe, and Stephen Crane, Mark Simpson sees mobility as a form of social contestation that legitimates some material and discursive practices at the expense of others. His analysis works best when he shows how the politics of mobility “draws political economy into play” (p. xxi) or when he illustrates the intersection between epistemology, economy, and traveling practices. However, narrative accounts written by slaves and free blacks in the nineteenth century showcase varying agendas for their authors and different reception and distribution channels from those of novels or other fiction written by white authors, who were often in the position to make connections with the world of letters. These differences become hard to follow or obscured amid abstract theoretical language and a vast array of texts, references, and genres. In Sarah Edmonds's Nurse and Spy in the Union Army (1865), Simpson mines the interesting arenas of “secret knowledge” gained during “covert travel” (p. 79) and the repertoire that Edmonds draws from a racist society. Yet he does not clarify the stakes of gendered and racial positioning in light of a tradition of free black women's travel writing of the period. By then, various forms of hybrid “travel narratives” were often self-fashioned or flexible genres where black women could claim the space and subjectivity to move in and out of geographic locations to critique dominant and problematic ideologies of war, medicine, education, and race. Simpson names “restlessness” as a dominant characteristic of Nat Turner's mobility. This seems an inadequate term to characterize the motive for a radical slave rebellion in which fifty-five whites were stabbed, shot, and clubbed to death. (Subsequently, close to two hundred black people, many of whom had nothing to do with the rebellion, were murdered by white mobs.) What about Turner's religious visions, rationalized as signs for embodied action? How does his belief in divine intervention, with visions of Christ on earth and his own sense of pending martyrdom, indicate another kind of quest, an ideology that mingles Christian typology, revenge, and martyrdom with the materiality of slavery?