‘Good Moves, Bad Moves’: Black Female Migration and Mobility in Discourses from the African Diaspora

General Tree’s popular reggae tune, “Gone a Negril,” opens with a female character asking for assistance in getting a visa to travel abroad. The male protagonist responds by offering her the much less valuable opportunity of a trip to Negril, a popular resort town in Jamaica. This comedic opening banter raises the question of how race and gender are represented as impacting black women’s ability to traverse geographic and social spaces in various forms of cultural discourse.

What is the “good” these women hope to accomplish through relocation? What “evil” do they have to encounter on their journeys? Is the source of their desire for movement related to the nature of the obstacles they encounter? This talk explored the “good” and “evil” in narratives of black female mobility and migration.