Mobility and Identity in Ladee Hubbard’s The Talented Ribkins

Cameron Williams Crawford

doi:10.31178/INTER.13.27.2

Autori

Cameron Williams Crawford Florida State University Autor

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.31178/INTER.13.27.2

Cuvinte cheie:

Ladee Hubbard, The Talented Ribkins, African American literature, mobility, movement, identity, race, gender, storytelling

Rezumat

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.

Biografie autor

Cameron Williams Crawford, Florida State University

Cameron Williams Crawford received her PhD in twentieth/twenty-first-century American literature and feminism, gender, and sexuality studies from Florida State University. Her work has been published in The South Atlantic Review, The Southern Quarterly, and Gender Forum. She is co-editor of the collection Telling an American Horror Story: Essays on History, Place and Identity in the Series (McFarland, 2021). She is an assistant professor at the University of North Georgia in Gainesville.