Speaker
Description
The paper adopts a critical Black mobilities paradigm and argues that contemporary Afro-diasporic historiographic metafictional novels, through speculative re-narration of slave history, contest racialised, hegemonic, and gendered mobilities. Their aesthetic manoeuvres enable captive characters and their progeny agency to map alternative routes towards freedom and mobility justice (Sheller). The locomotive and automotive histories staged in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Percival Everett’s I Am Not Sidney Poitier point towards the long durée of mobile itineraries of transatlantic slavery and their subversive potentials. Readings of the protagonist’s fugitive journeys aboard the liberty train and automobile road trip show how mobilities are accelerated for some or stasis is enforced for others, particularly non-white people and bodies (Cresswell 2014, 2016; Sheller, 2018).
The physical rail networks (including abolitionist safehouses) and routes of the railway and roadway shape “critical infrastructure” (Korpela, 2016, p. 115) that is institutions, systems, and laws that structure movement for non-white bodies and disproportionately enforce surveillance to confine and control them. The paper demonstrates how the novels recentre captive and descendant voices and interrogates the persisting racialised mobilities which re-emerge from the aftermaths of racial slavery’s (im)mobile structuring. Moreover, the analyses show how slavery’s im(mobile) regimes produce persisting discourses and systems that codify and represent enslaved people and their mobile itineraries as non-sanctioned and transgressive and how this, in turn, shapes their embodied practises and identities with transgenerational consequences. In so doing, the freedom flight and the adventure travel on the open road challenge assumptions of mobility that imply an equal free flow of people, and in the context of slavery, linked to freedom.
Biography
Marian Ofori-Amoafo is a doctoral candidate in US American studies at the University of Bayreuth. She is currently completing her dissertation examining twenty-first-century anglophone novels of slavery. Her thesis examines spaces and mobilities of slavery, their afterimages and transgenerational impacts on Afrodiasporic descendants. She has also lectured at both Bayreuth and Passau on African American literature and culture, anglophone African and Afrodiasporic literature, slavery studies, spatial literary and mobility studies, and immigrant literature. Additional areas of interest are race critical theories, Black feminist geographic and mobilities thought, transnational American studies, diaspora and Black Atlantic studies.
