"Gayl Jones and Travel No-Where"

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.31261/rias.16206

Keywords:

Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison, Palmares, Zumbi, The Ancestor: A Street Play, The Birdcatcher, Saidiya Hartman, critical fabulation, African diaspora, Portuguese colonialism, quilombo, Candomblé, travel

Abstract

Gayl Jones (USA, b. 1949) writes of journeys throughout the Americas, while also, if implicitly, exploring a global African diaspora. Her epic historical novel Palmares (2021) focuses on Brazil, retelling the story of Zumbi, 17th-century Afro-Brazilian leader of a quilombo, or fortified rebel city. Palmares did finally fall to Portuguese colonial militias in 1694-5, and in her book Gayl Jones’s protagonist, Almeyda, then travels to what she hopes will be a new or second Palmares. Her journey, however, frustratingly and paradoxically seems to get her nowhere. But, as we will see, this nowhere reveals the No-Where of Palmarians’ lives, a placelessness that seems uncertain, but at the same time offers freedom, or at least imaginative space. Like legendary “flying Africans,” people who escaped enslavement by leaping into the air, Jones’s characters appear to launch themselves into an unknown, a Not-Know-Where that may take them to Africa or somewhere utterly unanticipated. We can find other versions of this ambiguous travel in Gayl Jones’s drama, The Ancestor: A Street
Play (1975; 2020), and her novel, The Birdcatcher (1986; 2022)—and even in the works of Toni Morrison, whose novels show similar concern with what Saidiya Hartman calls “critical fabulation”: attempts to rethink history outside archives and beyond maps.

Author Biography

Wyn Kelley, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Wyn Kelley is a Senior Lecturer in the Literature Section at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA), where she teaches classes in literature of the Americas with a focus on fluid intersections of race, gender, and class, old and new media, and social, historical, and political contexts. She is author of Melville’s City: Literary and Urban Form in Nineteenth-Century New York (1996) and of Herman Melville: An Introduction (2008); and co-author, with Henry Jenkins, of Reading in a Participatory Culture: Re-Mixing Moby-Dick in the English Classroom (2013). Former Associate Editor of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, currently Associate Director of MEL (Melville Electronic Library), and co-editor (with Christopher Ohge) of the Wiley-Blackwell A New Companion to Herman Melville (2022), she has published essays in a number of journals and collections and has also worked to develop digital pedagogy with MIT’s Digital Humanities Lab. She is a founding member of the Melville Society Cultural Project, which supports programming at the New Bedford Whaling Museum and maritime culture in the New England region. More recently, after an opportunity to teach in São Paulo, Brazil, she has begun new work on the relationship between US authors and Brazil, focusing on writers like Frances E. W. Harper, Toni Morrison, and Gayl Jones. In support of these efforts, she has won an NEH grant at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, MA in 2024.

References

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Harper, Frances E. W. “Death of Zombi, The Chief of a Negro Kingdom in South America.” Poems. Philadelphia, Merrihew and Son, 1871. Web.

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Published

2024-06-27

How to Cite

Kelley, W. (2024). "Gayl Jones and Travel No-Where". Review of International American Studies, 17(1), 37–52. https://doi.org/10.31261/rias.16206

Issue

Vol. 17 No. 1 (2024): Journeying America(n)s: On Paradoxes of Travel (and) Narratives

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