Black South African Travel Texts, c.1850–Present: Mobility, Politics, Writing

This study is the first to analyze black South African literary and intellectual history through a lens of travel. It explores ways in which black writers, thinkers, activists, and ordinary citizens were – and continue to be – on the move, inscribing their mobilities. The thesis discusses wider, more varied histories and contemporary realities of travel and text in relation to South Africa than have generally been recognized. I argue that texts arising from, and speaking to, travel of various kinds are particularly salient given a significant thrust in South African history of politicizing, problematizing, and aiming to control black mobility and expression. The texts under study in relation to travel are necessarily multifarious and multiply inflected beyond ‘travel writing’ as conventionally understood by Anglo-American literary studies. Texts have arisen from a great variety of genres and modes, registering, valorizing, and interrogating forms of travel, as well as its metaphors, and addressing impositions to movement. I adopt an interdisciplinary methodology, bringing the literary-critical, historicist-archival, and geographic into conversation to explore the intersecting arenas of textuality and mobility under investigation. I examine black histories of text and travel in South Africa from the mid-19th century to the present day, with each of my four chapters adopting a thematic focus broadly tracking the chronological. I thus explore black South African travel texts over time through focusing, firstly, on their interests in shaping and stretching the Christian mission enterprise; secondly, on their claims to the nation and the world in relation to early-mid-20th-century modernity; thirdly, on their navigations of apartheid with a focus on women’s exertions; and, lastly, on their explorations and interpretations of freedom post-apartheid. In sum, my thesis opens up dimensions of an under-recognized ‘archive’ of black texts born out of movement. It sheds new light on black histories of writing and ideas in relation to mobility; unsettles preoccupations with South Africa’s boundedness in every sense; and fosters vital conversations about being black and on the move in the world today.