Cheryl J. Fish. Black and White Women's Travel Narratives: Antebellum Explorations. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2004. 224 pp. $59.95.

In Black and White Women's Travel Narratives, Cheryl J. Fish tracks the wide-ranging and often transnational mid-century travels of three women, black and white--Nancy Gardner Prince, Mary Jane Grant Seacole, and Margaret Fuller--and their hybrid accounts of travel and self-discovery. With its "recuperative and comparative" focus upon early women travelers outside dominant Anglo-American traditions of travel and writing, the book seeks to reframe existing and emerging work on "questions of travel" within African American and American literary studies. These relatively under-examined figures and texts compel us to, in Fish's words, "rethink the relationship between the early literature of travel, medical history, and mobile workingwomen of the African diaspora."

What transcultural alliances are made possible, Fish asks, as these women crossed and re-crossed the "black and white" Atlantic? The book does not celebrate travel as a "liberating power of movement," rather it examines how travel placed these women in contexts of political upheaval and imperial power that provoked profound ambivalence towards nation as home. Chapters on Prince and Seacole investigate mobility as a gendered trope and practice in the early writings of the African diaspora to shift, in the fashion of Carla Peterson, the emphasis given to the slave narrative as the "dominant genre" of black antebellum writing. These women, according to Fish, are important yet critically neglected cultural agents of travel in what Paul Gilroy theorizes as the productive intercultural space of the black Atlantic. To "gender" the black Atlantic requires, however, more than the substitution of a female passenger for a male sailor, and the book's stated decision to not "foreground questions of modernity and resistance to it" is rather unusual given its gendered reconstruction of Gilroy's black Atlantic.