ABSTRACT
When Margaret Fuller visited Niagara Falls and the Great Lakes in the summer of 1843, she went to see the West, to see new sights, to wander about and refresh herself after years of work and writing. The travel narrative she wrote, Summer on the Lakes, she calls “foot-notes . . . on the pages of my life during this summer’s wanderings.”1 Besides recounting her venture, this narrative vividly demonstrates the connections between travel, knowledge, and power, elements of a “politics of mobility,” as she interrogates systems of patriarchy and imperialism in American culture. Like the “politics of location,” a politics of mobility considers the correlations between place, self, voice, and politics-the power structures that impinge on or facilitate freedom. Politics, like history and identity, happen in a place, a location; as Adrienne Rich puts it, “a place on the map is also a place in history” within which the individual is created and creates. Just so, politics, history, and identity take place and are tested in movement, in mobility, in the meeting grounds of geography and cultures, the “‘in-between’ spaces” that Homi Bhabha contends “provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood . . . that initiate new signs of identity” for the individual and the nation. For women in the nineteenth century, as Fuller famously exposed in her landmark book Woman in the Nineteenth Century, the ideology of separate spheres constrained women’s cultural, legal, economic and creative mobilities and freedoms. Even more, legalized racist institutions worked against freedom of travel, political engagement, knowledge, and economic well-being for women of color, like African Americans, many of whom lived out a life of slavery, and like Native American women who faced genocide, poverty, and compulsory relocation from traditional lands. As Doreen Massey points out, “The limitation of women’s mobility, in terms both of identity and space, has been in some cultural contexts a crucial means of subordination.” That is why mobility, the ability to travel and to think innovatively about the self and the nation, is so important for Fuller and the women of her time. And that is why going to the frontier, the in-between space where cultures meet and negotiate new identities, is so important for Fuller’s political vision.2
