Michael Ra-Shon Hall, Freedom Beyond Confinement: Travel and the Imagination in African American Cultural History and Letters

In his Freedom Beyond Con nement: Travel and the Imagination in African American Culture History and Le ers Michael Ra-Shon Hall is less interested in the formalities of Black travel writing as a genre than he is in Black travel as both metaphor and physical act.For Hall, the Black mobility must be understood within a broader struggle for social freedom that in fact spans all possible genres, from postslavery Black journalism to Octavia Butler's time-traveling novel of slavery Kindred (1976) and on to Calvin A. Ramsey's play The Green Book (2006).From this perspective, African American travel texts modeled after a Euro-American genre have much in common with African American poetry, music, art, drama, and ction.That is, they all emerge from the same imaginative origins, and have all been shaped by the reality of African American privation.As such, argues Hall, all aspects of African American cultural production tend toward the idea of "freedom beyond con nement."Here Hall de nes "freedom" as "a state of being physically and socially unrestricted" (3).Unfortunately, he fails to sketch out further possibilities, leaving the reader to assume that the other half of his dialectic "con nement" must refers to the legal, economic, and social strictures that have conditioned Black life since the Jamestown arrival.Additionally for Hall, even if Black people seek a haven among diasporic populations in Central America or South America, or among Africans themselves, a state of true belonging, of home, is always out of one's grasp.