Title: Dialectics of Mobility: Spatial Politics and Resistance in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Abstract: Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl stands not only as a canonical text of African American women’s literature but also as a politically charged work that lays bare the spatial logic of slavery’s domination. Reexamined through the new mobilities paradigm, slavery emerges as a paradoxical mechanism in which “coerced circulation” and “spatial confinement” operate in tandem, subjecting Black women to a racialized spatial order of surveillance and intrusion through the differential allocation of mobility. Brent’s seven-year concealment in the garret constitutes a resistance practice centered on strategic immobility, generating a form of “stillness-as-mobility” through architectural apertures, the inversion of the gaze, and the manipulation of information. Yet her flight northward, cast under the shadow of the Fugitive Slave Act, must be further transmuted from “fugitive mobility” into a “lawful right to settle” through self-purchase and legal negotiation. This “dialectics of mobility” reveals that, for marginalized subjects at the bottom of power hierarchies, authentic freedom lies not in unidirectional geographic escape but in reclaiming sovereign agency over when to move and when to remain still—thereby opening a new pathway for the spatial-political critique of African American women’s literature.

Keywords: Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, new mobilities paradigm, strategic immobility, spatial politics, right to settle

Author: Yueling Ma, Lecturer, School of Foreign Languages, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China.

DOI: 10.19967/j.cnki.flc.2026.02.007