Moving Home

“In Moving Home, Sandra Gunning renders theoretically nuanced and historically informed readings of travel narratives that provocatively complicate our conceptions of Blackness in the nineteenth century. Gunning highlights how attending to the specificities of location, class, gender, religion, and ethnicity opens up startlingly fresh ways to analyze the literature of the period. In so doing, she has produced a bold and invigorating study that compels a new appreciation of the remarkable diversity of Black diasporic identities.” - Richard Yarborough, Professor of English and African American Studies, University of California, Los Angeles

“Sandra Gunning’s clear-sighted treatment of the complex political and social worlds in which her subjects found themselves and the multiple strategies through which they negotiated those worlds offers an especially important corrective to universalizing, homogenizing tendencies in much contemporary diasporic scholarship. Gunning argues for a new look at diaspora, particularly as a lens into the process of cultural change. Moving Home offers, in other words, provides a broad theory of the relationship of literature and literary criticism to profound social transformation.” - Priscilla Wald, author of Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative

“Moving Home takes a nuanced, intersectional approach to travel writers' construction of gendered identities. . . . Throughout her book, Gunning eschews generalization and accentuates instead the specific politics surrounding each text she discusses." - Elizabeth A. Bohls, Review 19

"An important corrective to dominant views of 19th-century Black identities and writings, as well as of travel writing, Gunning’s book will interest all scholars of literature and Black studies. Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty."
  - D. E. Magill, Choice