Abstract

In A Narrative of the Life and Travels of Mrs. Nancy Prince (1850), Nancy Gardner Prince travels from the northern United States to Russia and Jamaica and, in each location, struggles to create a “home” for herself and others through negotiation with (and resistance to) extant discourses of race, class, gender, and empire. Her utopias, like all real-world utopias, are doomed to fail, yet I argue that placing Prince’s Narrative within the context of an expanded definition of utopian discourse reveals African American engagement in utopian thought at a much earlier period than supposed. As early as the 1820s, thousands of African Americans were attempting to create egalitarian societies in Canada and the margins of the northern United States, and these experiments had a dramatic impact on the literature of the period. I place all of Prince’s utopias within the larger historical and literary context of the utopian fervor taking place throughout her lifetime. In so doing, I hope to expand the current conception of African American utopian literary production to include earlier, autobiographical writers such as Prince who sought out a “good place” significantly prior to the emergence of the African American utopian novel in the latter nineteenth century.

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