Gary Totten's African American Travel Narratives from Abroad illuminates the cultural work of travel writing as a form of resistance to the segregation and racial violence of the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. Examining the travel narrative as rendered by black writers ranging from Booker T. Washington and Matthew Henson to Ida B. Wells, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Zora Neale Hurston, as Totten argues, “emphasize[s] the unique and disruptive nature of black movement, particularly as it relates to issues of self and cultural identity and authority in travel texts written during the age of Jim Crow” (12).

Both the trope of mobility as a challenge to the spatial restrictions of segregation and the representation of the autonomous and strategically gendered black body of the writer offer “challenge[s] to oppressive ideology” at home in the US. Although this travel writing might sometimes seem to participate in an imperial “othering” of women from the Caribbean or of Inuit people, it performs a “direct and unflinching” challenge to the limitations placed on African Americans in the US (134). In the case of Ida B. Wells, reporting from Britain was “an act of traveling as a form of cultural work (rather than tourist pleasure)”; it was also a “trope for the ways in which the African American community might resist historical narratives of segregation and inequality and move toward greater forms of cultural power” (17).

Indeed, as cultural work meets subjectivity in the freer spaces “abroad,” an African American woman like Wells could retrace the historical transatlantic routes of the Middle Passage and refigure the very idea of work that historically relegated black bodies to chattel by drawing attention to her position as observer, reporter, and intellectual laborer. Both seeing and being seen as an embodied black female subject, however, Wells simultaneously contended with the roles of “eyewitness and embodied racial spectacle” as she negotiated the erasure of the body within travel writing and the demands placed upon her by her audience to embody the authentic experience of the endangered African American body (28).

According to Totten, Wells's identity could fluctuate and she could destabilize expectations in the same way she could move physically through space and history, which enabled her to deploy tropes of history and travel in a “redemptive critique” that “reimagine[s] black mobility and subjectivity” in a way that transformed her cultural work into increased options for cultural power among black people (32). In the final chapter of the book, Totten discusses Zora Neale Hurston's anthropological work in Jamaica and Haiti, which was often classified as travelogue due to her assertions of narrative authority that fell outside approved anthropological methods. As was the case with Wells, Hurston's mobility in the Caribbean retraced and redrew the currents of the Middle Passage.

In contrast, Totten reads Booker T. Washington's travels in The Man Farthest Down (1913) as falling short of the redemptive critique; most simply put, “despite having traveled through Europe for seven weeks, Washington never left the South” (50). Washington's cultural work, geared toward social uplift for southern blacks, was mired in his rhetorical complicity in narratives of exploration and conquest and his tendency to sanitize history as well as contemporary experience. This assessment falls into place with other scholarly assessments of Washington, particularly Houston Baker's.Footnote ¹ In contrast, while Totten's chapter on Matthew Henson indicates that Henson also participates in some primitivizing moves that we might associate with imperialism (such as his depiction of Eskimos), his narrative ultimately highlights African Americans’ geographical and cultural mobility (65). The contrast between the women writers discussed and the two men – Washington and Henson – reveals some of the complexities of the cultural work Totten seeks to illuminate.

The chapter on Jessie Redmon Fauset and The Crisis compares Fauset's travel narratives to writing by W. E. B. Du Bois and Clara Stillman in the periodical. This and the final chapter, on Hurston, are substantially longer than the opening chapters and delve into readings of Fauset and Hurston that urge us to rethink their cultural work because of their nuanced gender positions in France, Algiers, Jamaica, and Haiti. The “high stakes” of transmitting cultural knowledge through the “their bodies and voice” (132) while abroad offer a fascinating contrast with the suffocation and silencing of Jim Crow culture at home – a contrast that Totten evokes consistently and powerfully. The range of contextual comparisons, the historical specificity, and the superb critical positioning and integration of previous scholarship in this work make it an intriguing and flawlessly readable study of these African American cultural figures.