[Inter]sections

Articles

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  Across Rivers and Selves: Mobile Identities in 19th-Century American Literature of Enslavement and Escape

  Elena Furlanetto (Author)

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  Abstract

  The history of slavery is also a history of mobility: as the enslaved resisted, were displaced or replaced, planned insurrections, devised escape routes both fictional and historical, they did have geographical agency. In response to Orlando Patterson’s understanding of slavery as corpse-like immobility and a permanent condition of living death, it can also be read through the prism of movement. This article starts from this assumption to complicate the issue of enslaved mobility as geographical as well as existential. My focus is on the proximity between geographical movement to freedom on roads and across rivers and borders, and the identity metamorphoses that accompany it. I perform close readings from 19th-century African American narratives of enslavement and escape that capture bonded individuals in the mo(ve)ment of geographical and existential transit. The characters of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman (1899) move not only across land, but also across selves. For the fugitive, escaping bondage meant adopting fictional identities to avoid detection and capture; “passing” in terms of race is one of the most common, but racial camouflage is often accompanied by crossings of gender, dis/ability, and age lines. This article’s primary aim is to recast escape not as a linear trajectory but as a chain of interlocked mobilities, and study the existential movements that radiate from the experience of crossing the borders to the Northern states.

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  Mobility and Identity in Ladee Hubbard’s The Talented Ribkins

  Cameron Williams Crawford (Author)

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  Abstract

  This article examines themes of mobility and identity Ladee Hubbard’s The Talented Ribkins (2017). I use the lens of mobility studies to closely analyze the novel’s two primary characters, Johnny and Eloise, and the ways in which their cross-Florida road trip is both a literal and symbolic journey to self-discovery for each. In addition, I look at W.E.B. Du Bois and Zora Neale Hurston as inspiration for Hubbard’s novel and explore the role of storytelling as central to each character’s process of identity formation. I furthermore consider the novel’s Florida setting as particularly fertile ground for interrogations of mobility, given the state’s place in the literary and national imaginations as a nexus of movement, ultimately asserting that reading The Talented Ribkins within this context can only illuminate its commentary on racial justice.

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  Transnationality and Incorporation in the American Road: Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive (2019)

  Catarina Moura (Author)

  Abstract

  Often set in the mythical landscapes of the American West, the American road narrative conveys the promise of spatial and social mobility that characterize the American Dream and that are made possible by going on the road. Nevertheless, this idea of mobility has been reserved to traditional road heroes—white, heteronormative men—and systemically excluded minorities from accessing the road in the same terms. Consequently, this had an impact on how American road narratives written by and about minorities have been received and analyzed. This article aims to analyze the novel Lost Children Archive (2019), written by Mexican-American author Valeria Luiselli, therefore applying a transnational perspective to the American road narrative genre. Drawing on Ann Brigham’s concept of incorporation, it aims to understand how this narrative is positioned in the matrix of the genre and how it is able to deconstruct the hegemonic discourses that shape it.

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  “Jus’ hol’ yuh breath an’ kick”: Queer Self-Made Womanhood in Nicole Dennis-Benn’s “Swimmer”

  Teresa Pereira (Author)

  Abstract

  This article performs a close reading of the essay “Swimmer,” written by the Jamaican American novelist Nicole Dennis-Benn and published in the anthology The Good Immigrant USA: 26 Writers Reflect on America (2019). On the one hand, “Swimmer” endorses the myths of the self-made man and the American dream by describing the remarkable achievements of its author, regardless of all the obstacles in her way. On the other hand, though, it questions the American success mythology by shedding light on the hardships faced by migrants. As a result, this article considers the following research questions: “Does Nicole Dennis-Benn’s ‘Swimmer’ both legitimize and challenge the myth of the self-made man and, by extension, the myth of the American dream?” and, if so, “In which way are the myths of the self-made man and of the American dream simultaneously celebrated and questioned in ‘Swimmer’?”. To do so, this analysis adopts an approach located within the field of cultural studies, embracing its interdisciplinary nature and combining literary studies with American and Jamaican history and culture, while departing from Heike Paul’s problematization of American myths in The Myths that Made America: An Introduction to American Studies (2014).

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  William Least Heat-Moon’s American Travels: Representing Spaces through the American Road Narrative

  Alice Carletto (Author)

  Abstract

  William Least Heat-Moon embarked on a road trip across the United States in 1978, after having lost his job as a professor and after divorcing. With his van, called Ghost Dancing, after Native American ceremonies, Heat-Moon hits the open road for three months, travelling only through the backroads of America, with the intention to find pristine places. These experiences on the road are recounted in his well-known road book Blue Highways: A Journey into America (1982). The aim of this article is to discuss the representation of space—natural and manmade—within Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways, using ecocritical and geocritical studies as a methodological mapping for the analysis. Applying the ecocritical and geocritical approaches will contribute to provide a more comprehensive study on the topic of space, leading also to a reconsideration of the genre of the American road narrative, and consequently, providing new insights on mobilities and space studies.

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  Controlling Migration: How Martha of the North and Exile Reclaim Inuit Sovereignty

  Lara Bulger (Author)

  Abstract

  In the twenty-first century, there is increased awareness in Canada about the horrors of residential schools and the destructive actions of the government towards First Nations peoples. But this education has not extended to the histories of Arctic Indigenous peoples, whose experience of settler colonialism is different because of their geographical location. Until outside intervention, Inuit had been semi-nomadic, populating the North with small, mobile communities, as this way of life was best suited for hunting and traditional practices. Beginning in the 1950s, the Canadian government forced Inuit into centralized communities, pressuring them to leave their lands and thereby destroying a traditional way of life that had been in place for thousands of years. This article will explore the negative consequences of ‘domicide’, or the killing of one’s home, and the cultural devastation that followed. Years later, the relocation and its impacts were depicted in Inuit-made documentaries, such as Marquise Lepage’s Martha of the North in 2008, and Exile by Zacharias Kunuk in 2009. In this chapter, I will detail how Inuit-made film is helping Northerners reclaim Arctic sovereignty, documenting for future generations how their ancestors lived.

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  Moving out of the Background: Québec Women Filmmakers and the American Roads

  Karine Bertrand, Claire Gray (Author)

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  In the American tradition of the road movie, female characters have often been relegated to being sex workers, third wheels, or background characters who can only be foils to the journeys of male characters on the road. This study examines how two Québécois documentaries, Hotel Chronicles (Léa Pool, 1990) and L.A. Tea Time (Sophie Bédard-Marcotte, 2019) comment on and subvert these expectations of women by placing them simultaneously behind the camera and behind the steering wheel as they travel these American roads. In completing close analysis of scenes from both films and comparing it with texts in feminist studies and Québécois cultural history, this study will reveal the fabricated nature of the American road as well as attest how Québécois women find their place on it.

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  “Flowing Perpetually Outward”: Quest and Journey in Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998)

  Filipa Rosário (Author)

  Abstract

  North American director Terrence Malick’s films poetically explore inner journeys that, particularly in his early work, deeply engage with the narratives surrounding the American Dream, often intertwining these with literal jour al inquiry, which propels their personal journeys and serves as the core narrative element of his films. In Malick’s transcendentalist framework, the interplay between a character’s path and the surrounding landscape connects to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s concept of the Over-Soul, a philosophical idea in which all things converge and unify. This article examines Malick’s interpretation of mobility in The Thin Red Line (1998), analysing its (meta)physical journey through thematic and philosophical lenses. This approach aims to illuminate how the notion of the Over-Soul continues to shape Malick’s spiritual approach to storytelling. The analysis will consider both narrative structure and formal style to explore this relationship.