“No sooner was I on British soil, than I was recognized as a man, and an equal. The very dogs in the streets appeared conscious of my manhood,” writes William Wells Brown in the opening chapter of his 1855 The American Fugitive in Europe. Brown’s statement, and, indeed, the title of his travel memoir, says something about the ways in which the terms of mobility, motion, and migration make and unmake subjects living under the constraints of empire. This course seeks to unearth how writers in the Atlantic World—from the Age of Enlightenment to the Antebellum Era—thought about movement as a means by which to distinguish the subject from the subordinated, the citizen from the chattel, and the essential from the extraneous. Each text we read will wrestle in its own way with the promises and problems of travel and migration as both a means of oppression and a means of resistance.

This course fulfills the following English major/minor requirement: Identity/Difference