Mobility, and its restrictions, has consistently shaped the Black Diasporic subject. From the hold of a slave ship during the Middle Passage to confined movement in the Americas, the Black American’s relation to movement has been one of “successive displacements, migrations, and journeys (forced and otherwise)” (Gilroy, Black Atlantic). Scholarship as diverse as Hazel Carby’s work on migrating Black women, Christina Sharpe’s reflections on the Atlantic and “wake work,” and Houston A. Baker, Jr.’s ruminations on blues, rhythm, and the railroad have delineated the significance of travel, and, relatedly, the constructions of Black space and Black time, in diasporic literature. This panel traces the dynamics of Black travel in 20^th/21^st century Black literature and culture. How have authors and artists represented the difficulties—and pleasures—of Black mobility? How has the Black subject negotiated travel in times and spaces that would contest her movement? Exploring both the metaphor and materiality of Black travel, panelists detail the aesthetic considerations of travel, temporality and spatiality in poetry, fiction, essays, and visual media.

The panel begins with Miriam Thaggert’s discussion of Black female train travel and Pauli Murray’s travel narratives. “First-Class and Freight Cars: Pauli Murray and Queer Black Travel” details Murray’s public and private travel writings and photographs. Offering a brief overview of Black female train travel in literature, the paper focuses on Murray, the scholar/lawyer who coined the phrase “Jane Crow.” In the 1930s, Murray identified as male, an identification revealed more openly in her private diaries, photographs and short story “Three Thousand Miles on a Dime in Ten Days” (1934) than in her 1987 autobiography, A Song in a Weary Throat. By comparing the public and private accounts of her travel episodes, several of which took place on freight cars when she presented and was photographed as male, Thaggert argues that we catch a rare, queer glimpse of Black female railroad pleasure. The paper revises conceptions of hobo or vagrant travel during the Great Depression as primarily a white male phenomenon and complicates train travel usually depicted with Black male subjects.

The panel continues with Michael Ra-shon Hall’s paper, “Freedom and Its Discontents: Langston Hughes’s “Freedom Train” and Travel in the Black Imaginary.” The paper studies the duality of confinement and freedom as reflected in the controversial Freedom Train exhibit of 1947-49, sponsored by the conservative American Heritage Foundation. The Freedom train tour was an exhibition of documents foundational to American national identity, such as the Declaration of Independence and US Constitution. It traveled through 48 states on a train and celebrated American ideals, even as exhibition protocols demonstrated those ideals’ illusory status. Southern states insisted on racial segregation during tour stops. Langston Hughes’ poem “Freedom Train” (1947), just one of several creative reactions to the tour’s controversies, captures the conflicting interpretations of the exhibit’s documents and meanings. Hall uses the exhibition and Hughes’ poem to discuss a number of Black creative works which, taken together, reflect the effort to reconcile the freedom train with its competitor, the Jim Crow train, in the Black travel imaginary.

The panel concludes with Shaun Myers’ analysis of Black mobility, temporality and space. Her paper, “Black Transit: Post-Civil Rights Movements in Time,” examines the ongoing, dominant construction of time as a confine around, or a demand upon, Black life. In particular, she explores the ways in which time, structured imperatively, holds Black movement in abeyance, within enclosures of progress and punctuality. Black cultural producers, she shows, contest these modes of temporal power by reimagining the Black figure in stasis and in motion. Placing a range of works, including James Alan McPherson’s short story “A Solo Song: For Doc” (1970), Claudia Rankine’s video-essay “Situation 5” (circa 2011), and the television series Lovecraft Country (2020), in conversation around the analytic of transit, she tracks how these artists reconfigure idling and movement into stays against unfreedom. Myers theorizes how these rescriptings of Black movement set the clock and calendar otherwise, in ways that might just, in Toni Morrison’s words, butt “time wide open.”

The 75-minute panel is moderated by Kimberly S. Love, an independent scholar/writer of the Black South. Love’s fiction and nonfiction writing on Black southern life and land will enable her to expertly guide the panel. Each paper is 15 to 20 minutes long, leaving 15 to 20 minutes for Q & A. With Black literature specialists at different stages in their careers at diverse institutions, the panel will attract MLA members interested in Black studies, gender and sexuality, poetry, visual culture, and museum exhibitions.