Jennifer Law-Sullivan  (Oakland University)
Flora Tristan and the Contact Zone between Race & Gender

In her autobiographical travelogue Pérégrinations d'une paria, Flora Tristan energetically takes up the causes of both women's rights and the anti-slavery movement. She employs slave imagery to argue for the right to divorce and gender equality rhetoric to deplore slavery. Before Tristan can become a true champion of these causes, however, she must first embark on her journey to Peru. It is only during this voyage across the Atlantic that Tristan witnesses firsthand the slave trade and the appalling conditions of slaves in South America and experiences the unfair difficulties a woman traveling alone must endure. It is the argument of this paper that the text Tristan produces from these travels is one of contact literature, existing as a sort of border zone between issues of gender and race that is borne out of the border zone she observed - and participated in - that exists between the colonizer and colonized. As with all border areas, there are times in Tristan's work when the two separate issues collide and conflict. Nevertheless, the end result is one of a tentative understanding and commonality between what Tristan sees as two sides of the same equality coin. Upon her return to France, Tristan goes on to take on the cause of the working class, further illustrating her commitment to her sweeping definition of equality for all of humankind. At times simplistic and hyperbolic, Tristan's work nonetheless perfectly illustrates the oftentimes uncomfortable correlation between questions of race and gender in the nineteenth century.