Speaker
Description
Black Americans in the period labelled the First Great Migration (c. 1910--40), when car travel was financially less accessible than later and often fraught with danger for Black motorists, most often established larger-scale imaginations of the nation they were citizens of through long train journeys. Accounts of such mobilities build on the personal narratives of long-distance journeys which are a primary African American literary genre, stretching back to autobiographies by ex-slaves such as of William Wells Brown (1847), built around travel, some of it forced, between slave states and ‘free’ states in the period before the Civil War. From an account of African American residential patterns and experiences of longer-distance mobility at the beginning of the twentieth century reflecting on Henry Gannett’s map ‘Proportion of Negro Total Population of the United States at the Twelfth Census’ (1900), the paper moves to literary case studies: 1920s to 1950s poems, short stories and autobiographical pieces written by Langston Hughes which focus on journeys between the southwestern portion of America’s industrialised belt in the state of Missouri, where Hughes was born in 1901, and urban centres to its northeast, especially New York City, where he died in 1967 decades after playing a pivotal role there in the Harlem Renaissance. Rather than developing an identitarian critique, the paper contributes to understanding the possibilities of the human imagination as developed through values, worldviews and beliefs: diverse and pluralistic imaginaries. As such, it participates in an ongoing humanization of transport studies.
Biography
Jason Finch is Professor in the department of English Language and Literature at Åbo Akademi University. A spatial literary scholar with interests in cities and mobilities, his most recent book is Literary Urban Studies and How to Practice It (2022). In 2023 he co-edited special features of the Journal of Urban History (‘Mediating and Representing the Slum’) and Urban Studies (‘Public Transport as Public Space’).
