Stranger in the Village

Two Centuries of African-American Travel Writing

This anthology documents two centuries of writing by African-Americans who have traveled abroad in search of new opportunities, political insight, pleasure, and adventure. Includes work by James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Matthew Henson, W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Ntozake Shange, and more.

Representing a people that first "traveled" to the New World via slavery, this splendid collection of 47 entries reveals a complex and nonmonolithic African American world-view ranging from U.S. frontier exploration to Pan-Africanism.

Alongside James Baldwin, W.E.B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, and Claude McKay writing about Paris, Mexico, Africa, and Russia, author Ntozake Shange muses on the unifying presence of the African American Motown sound in Nicaragua, and 19th-century leader Booker T. Washington offers astute analysis of northern Italian prejudice against its southern citizens. In Martin Luther King Jr.'s description of his 1959 pilgrimage to India, he writes, "We were looked upon as brothers with the color of our skins as something of an asset...," whereas in journalist Carl T. Rowan's 1956 visit, forecasting today's India- Pakistan nuclear conflict, the mood is not so optimistic: "Here was an inverse racism as much a threat to peace ... as the kind of racism I suffered."

Although the inclusion of the various journals by Africans who survived the Middle Passage would have been welcome, this book is a long-overdue addition to the genre of travel writing, showing once and for all that African Americans are, and have always been, a global people. --Eugene Holley Jr.