Section Editors' Introduction

"Not only would I become a writer but a travelin' woman as well."

—Paule Marshall Triangular Road

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?

This special section brings together essays, poems, and an interview that address the above and other questions about travel theory and cosmopolitanism.¹ The essays propose transnational frameworks that expand the subjects of cosmopolitanism to include travelers whose sexuality, gender, race, economic class and/or social status tend to foreclose their access to world citizenship. This selection of Black feminist scholarship and creative work accepts as a general premise that Black women are and have been migratory subjects—as Carole Boyce Davies's groundbreaking Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (1994) establishes—and that our spatial acts of resistance compel a rethinking of geographical paradigms.²

Placing Black women at the center of travel theory unmasks its universalism and replaces it with materialist and historically situated analyses. Several contributors reconceptualize cosmopolitanism as a means through which Black women writers, intellectuals, and performers pursue self-fashioning, outside of and against colonialist representations. Following Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo's use of term to describe nineteenth century writers of African descent, these authors mean "both to echo the characterization of cosmopolitanism as a drive to define oneself in relation to the world beyond one's own that undergirds conventional definitions and to interrogate the hierarchy and othering that they often also imply" (2005, 162). Some writers favor transnationalism and diaspora as analytic frameworks over or in collaboration with cosmopolitanism. They underscore how the proliferation of migratory terms and practices in the twenty-first century strives to capture the circulation of involuntary travelers and tourists and to gauge their impact on the communities that receive them. Other contributors maintain that the cultural "worldliness" associated with the privilege of travel can be acquired in localized diasporas or attained by alternative means of conveyance like letter writing. Cosmopolitanism, in this regard, is not opposed to nationalism as it is not uncommon for Black women in the diaspora to have citizenship in one place and affective ties to another. We ask if feminist analyses tend to favor more "rooted" cosmopolitanisms and whether or not the coupling of women and rootedness draws on essentialized notions of "home," the domestic, or motherland. We also explore how diasporic spatialities create alternative cosmopolitanisms. In this way, we strive toward a balance between reifying mobility and consigning women to a fixed space, such as the domestic realm.

The cosmopolitan possibilities created by Black subjects on the move was also a central concern in Paul Gilroy's broadly influential The Black Atlantic (1993). Following James Clifford's ethnographic approach to traveling culture, Gilroy argues that various modes of travel transformed Black exiles into cosmopolitan figures: "Whether their experience of exile is enforced or chosen, temporary or permanent, these intellectuals and activists, writers, speakers, poets, and artists repeatedly articulate a desire to escape the restrictive bonds of ethnicity, national identification, and sometimes even 'race' itself " (1993, 19). Gilroy's portrait of Black exiles left ample room for critique and intervention. One of the most significant...