Nancy Cunard was not, strictly speaking, a travel writer. The texts she produced as a consequence of her travels through empire may nonetheless be read as records of a political tourism, because they exhibit the ambivalence of the tourist's gaze even as Cunard claims partisanship in the causes she strives to represent. In the early 1930s, during the making of her Negro anthology, a project meant to record "the struggles and achievements, the persecutions and the revolts against them, of the Negro peoples," Nancy Cunard traveled to Harlem and the Caribbean. The writing she produced around these struggles I aim to read as the texts of a political tourism, and thereby to situate Cunard in relation to the by now well-known paradigm of the imperial lady traveler. The great-granddaughter of the founder of the Cunard shipping lines, and modernist poet, editor, publisher and bohemian, Nancy Cunard was also a traveler in empire, but one who undoubtedly would have refused the label of "lady" and whose purpose in traveling was explicitly anti-imperialist. The angle afforded by the concept of political tourism makes it possible to re-map Cunard's relation to her subject matter: her travels and her writing become records of the processes of identification and political affect produced through the articulation of cultural difference. If tourism may be understood as both movement through, and the (re)production of arenas of social and cultural difference, it also necessarily entails a staging of self in relation to other(s). For Cunard, who is endeavoring to speak from a place outside of imperial constructions of whiteness in her political identification with black struggles, that staging of self is particularly vexed, for it is here that she continually risks a rehearsal of the imperial script.
In the records of her travels Cunard makes a discernible effort to transform herself from daughter of empire to partisan in the cause for racial justice, but in becoming partisan Cunard is anxious to erase the social and political boundaries that hinder her transformation. The boundaries Cunard encountered in her travels were not only racialized but gendered. The "sex scandal" at the heart of imperial discourse marks Cunard's political journey, but is subsumed in her writing by the binary of black and white. Unable to do away with racial difference, Cunard is silent on the subject of gender as a means of effacing her implication in the imperialist discourses she is striving to refute and disown. In this way, her silence about gender comes to be a silence about whiteness, even when she seems to be taking her whiteness into account. Like the repressed that must return, the gender lacuna in effect comes to operate as an aporia in Cunard's writing on race, persistently undermining her efforts to speak from a place outside of imperialist discourse.
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