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Edilio Jetlife
Paule Marshall's award-winning memoir Triangular Road (2009) opens with "An Homage to Mr. Hughes." Like the self-proclaimed wondering wanderer, Marshall has known rivers, and oceans, and seas. In the first chapter of her memoir, she recalls her cultural tour through Europe with Langston Hughes and William Melvin Kelley at the behest of the U.S. Department of State. Hughes had requested that the younger writers accompany him for a series of readings and dialogues about African American literature. For Marshall, the opportunity was much more than an occasion to join the poet laureate of Black America on a month-long cultural tour of Europe. It was a chance to become "a travelin' woman." What does it mean for a Black woman writer to be a traveling woman? How does travel affect Black women's creative and intellectual subjectivities? Alternatively, how does racialized and female-gendered experience alter theories and practices of travel? What are the relationships between travel and political ideologies like allegiances to race and nation and notions of citizenship?