“Everything I Wanted Not to Be”: The Specter of Africa in the Trans Travel Narrative

Previous scholarship has interrogated how transsexual autobiographies recursively construct a gender-coherent subject through travel analogies. Orientalism has been one of the predominant frames through which these trans travel narratives have been interpreted. Through a close reading of Jan Morris’s autobiography, Conundrum, this paper attends to the overwhelming anti-Blackness that scaffolds these voyages to and through the Orient. Exploring how “Black Africa” has been occluded from Orientalist analyses of trans travel narratives, the author asks what might be found by attending specifically to the role of Africa (as a metaphor for Blackened rather than Orientalized geographies) in these autobiographies. Through Black studies, trans studies, affect theory, and Kleinian object relations theory, the essay demonstrates how Blackness grounds both trans travel narratives and the scholarship about them. Through a metacritique of both Orientalism and trans studies, this paper concludes by suggesting that scholars provincialize Orientalism.