Geographies of Flight: Phyllis Wheatley to Octavia Butler. William Merrill Decker

Abstract

explores diverse and (predominately) first-person narrative accounts by African diaspora authors that foreground various forms of antebellum and postbellum captivity, including barriers to geographical and social mobility. The book focuses on narrative accounts while also demonstrating how “the inscribed rapport (spa-tial and social)” that such writings create “between author and reader is itself an occasion of dynamic and revisionist mapping.” A multi-genre study detailing “the geographies of the fugitive slave narrative and its descendants, the postslave and neo-slave narrative” (1), Decker argues that while a white Eurocentric literary tra-dition represents New World topography as open space free to peruse, writings by African Americans often portray that same New World topography as a series of traps both unsafe and unwelcoming. Challenging the oppressive effects of such entrapments, Decker contends that first-person writings of African diaspora authors “do more than reflect contours of captivity, constraint, and oppression” but suggest a “reinvented world proceeding from the first-person pronoun” (2). analysis the of