PLEASE NOTE: An updated version of this project is available  here .

-- Michel de Certeau, "Walking in the City"

My city of rowhomes and crab cakes and noise, always noise -- the 12 O’Clock Boys on their dirt bikes, the neighbors’ children sprinting up and down the stairs, police helicopters overhead, the tinny jingle of the ice cream truck on the park. Where Nashville sprawls, Baltimore congests, houses built in tight rows along narrow streets, box stores squeezed onto lots too small for them. Here in Nashville I use a full tank of gas nearly every week just driving between school and home, with the occasional trip to a friend’s house. In Baltimore, there was a time when I walked or biked to work every morning, rain or shine, dripping with sweat in the summer, my hair tangled from cold harbor winds in the winter. The city was a friend. We knew each other.

When I moved to Nashville, I missed the walking. To work, to dinner, to my sister’s house nine blocks south. And more than that. I missed the feeling of eavesdropping on my city. So as we began this course, and as we began talking about maps and trees and graphic representations of literature, here I was, still thinking about walking. About cataloguing routes. I thought about Baudelaire’s flâneur and the power of leisurely spectatorship. And I thought about my city, walking it every day without ever reaching the invisibility of a true flâneur.

Janet Wolff argues that the female flâneur, or flâneuse, isn’t a real possibility: “There is no question of inventing the flâneuse,” she writes. “The essential point is that such a figure was rendered impossible by the sexual divisions of the nineteenth century” (45). In a lot of ways, I agree with her, even when I reassign her comments to a contemporary context. How many times have I been honked at on the street, disrupting a rêverie? How many times have I felt uncomfortable as the lone woman on a dark block? Perhaps the role of the flâneur always necessitates masculinity, because its fundamental principle is the ability to remain invisible, and the female body -- by no fault of its own, of course -- simply does not have access to that same kind of invisibility. 

Yet what Wolff and many of her fellow critics of the flâneuse leave out is the question of race -- and I see this as a massive oversight. If the female body’s hyper-visibility precludes the possibility of the flâneuse, how do we understand this concept in relation to the Black body? Baudelaire’s loafing flâneur is the picture of sophistication -- the languid, fashionable dandy. To dawdle while Black, however, is not a celebration; it is loitering. It is a crime. For Blackness is itself a kind of paradox -- that which renders one both invisible and hyper-visible simultaneously. The Black body is negligible to authority until the very moment it becomes otherwise, and then it is rendered deviant, criminal.

In 1863, Baudelaire wrote that the flâneur is “an ‘I’ with an insatiable appetite for the ‘non-I’, at every instant rendering and explaining it in pictures more living than life itself, which is always unstable and fugitive” (9-10). Though Lincoln had freed the slaves in the Confederate States of America on January 1 of that year, there were yet hundreds of thousands of Black men and women in bondage in the US, in border states and in Texas, many of whom remained true fugitives until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, the ‘non-I’ risking discovery and death for the chance to become an ‘I.’

For this project, I wanted to interrogate the notion of the Black flâneur. To do this, I examined three New York City-based novels spanning roughly across the 20th century: The Blacker the Berry (1929) by Wallace Thurman, If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) by James Baldwin, and Open City (2011) by Teju Cole. I mapped the walks taken by characters in these novels, hoping to consider these routes not only as representations of the city over time but also as a reflection of the characters’ internal states.

By mapping these routes, I hoped to create a kind of psychogeographic map, a bird’s-eye representation of a character’s interiority. I hoped to use a very specific, focused spatial analysis to begin to address a larger question I have, a question about the relationship between race and walking: when the characteristic flâneur makes his personal map by being invisible within the space of the city, a silent and leisurely observer, is it possible for more visible non-white, non-male characters to occupy this same role?

To collect this data, I sorted through a number of books -- not just the three above, though I ultimately narrowed down my mapping in the interest of time. I took note of any walking scenes and assembled all walks in  Google Sheets , organizing them accordingly.

My columns were as follows: book title, author, year of publication, the character in question, the general route taken, the page on which this occurs, the location and the direction in which the character is heading. I also assigned a number to each location, with whole numbers representing destinations and decimals representing roads specified between the two locations.

I then mapped each of these points, connecting them as needed to denote a single walk or route. I've attached quotes from each novel to every location and route mapped, and have added images of the locations to give the reader the simultaneous sense of experiencing the city from a bird’s-eye view and at street-level.

My final product was a trio of maps, each one quite different from the others. When viewed separately, the maps are case studies, portraits of characters -- of their relationships, their internal states, their personal trajectories. Viewed together, however, they are representations of the larger history of New York City. The impact of segregation becomes quickly apparent. 

The reality of segregation is clearly visible in this map, which is by far the smallest geographical area out of our three case studies. In Nella Larsen's Quicksand, our narrator reflects that the protagonist's existence "was bounded by Central Park, Fifth Avenue, St. Nicholas Park, and One Hundred and Forty-Fifth Street. Not at all a narrow life, as Negroes live it, as Helga Crane knew it. Everything was there" (46). So too is Emma Lou's life bounded by these cross-streets in The Blacker the Berry. Emma's situation as a single young woman further restricts her movements. While for the most part neither Helga Crane nor Emma Lou is dissatisfied with Harlem, each woman ultimately comes to feel trapped, if not by the boundary of the neighborhood itself, then by the societal boundaries that these cross-streets represent.

Tish and Fonny's wanderings in Beale Street are farther afield than those of Emma Lou. While Tish's life without Fonny is largely confined to Harlem, the specifics of her life there are not mapped nearly as explicitly as her walks in Greenwich Village -- hence the simple outlining of Harlem on this map. Additionally, Tish and Fonny's expanded radius is not without increased risk. It is in the Village that Tish is harrassed by a young man at a tomato market, that Fonny is targeted by the police officer who ultimately pins Mrs. Rogers' rape on him. We also see the difficulties of moving beyond the geographic limits of Harlem in Tish and Fonny's long search to find a livable apartment space in lower Manhattan.

Finally, I moved on to Cole’s Open City. This book is perhaps the most clearly a flâneur narrative, and is the most obviously French-inspired of the novels I’ve analyzed; while the book features the rolling internal monologue of a Nigerian doctor wandering about New York, its focus on interiority and engagement with philosophical theory feel distinctly French; there is, for instance, a reflection on blindness and photography in Act I that is clearly reminiscent of Barthes. 

Julius’s ramblings are Baudelairean in nature. He is a wanderer of parks, boulevards, shopping malls, cafes. He is, generally, willfully invisible. In this, Julian is thoroughly a product of his time. The novel is set in a contemporary, post-9/11 New York. Julius’s status as a doctor and his existence in an Obama-era United States mean his wanderings are hindered by no real racial restrictions. So, too, is his invisibility a reflection of the diversity of New York City itself. In the same year, in a different city, this same kind of covert observation would not be possible.

That walking can be a kind of reclamation is true for Julius in Open City. As an immigrant, he makes himself feel welcome in a potentially hostile space by cultivating an intimacy with the city that affirms his place there, giving him a sense of belonging. But this belonging is a complicated matter; at the close of the novel, we discover that Julius sexually assaulted a woman in his life nearly a decade prior, and seemingly has no conflicted emotions about the experience. Throughout the novel, Julius interacts with other immigrants and colonial subjects all over the city, but the third act of the novels reveals the bodily, Julius has also taken on the role of colonizer. When is walking the city an act of self-reclamation, of self-actualization, and when is that reclamation simply another kind of colonization? Perhaps it can be both simultaneously.

As I close this initial phase of my project, it's clear to me that there's a clear correlation in these maps between year and total area wandered. This is is not unrelated to New York City's history of redlining and segregation. Nor are the gender dynamics in the various periods these novels cover irrelevant -- indeed, one can easily note that our novels' Black male characters have more freedom to wander, even if that wandering is fraught. Admittedly, this is an imperfect study; the data set is far too small to make significant conclusions. But I’m also not searching for statistical significance so much as consistent anecdotal evidence. I could never catalogue every Black New York City novel. However, I’d also like to take the time to make a more thorough analysis of the textual content of these novels (specifically characters’ internal monologues) in order to better understand the relationship between geographical exploration and self-exploration.

To continue this project, I would consider a number of possible routes forward:

• Overlaying the separate maps I’ve created onto the same single space, with a sliding timeline and a filter for texts so readers could observe them together and apart and more clearly observe how wandering changes over time
• Potentially layering redlining data over the map, also with a timeline slider, to obviate the role segregation plays in these walks
• Expanding the study to more texts: Danzy Senna's New People (2017), Claude McKay's Home to Harlem (1928) and Nella Larsen's Quicksand (1928) come to mind
• Considering how narratives of passing, like Jessie Redmon Fauset's Plum Bun (1928) or Larsen's Passing (1929), might change these data stories, how a lighter complexion may be associated with greater freedom of movement -- and also how passing may regulate one's movement across neighborhood boundaries in the opposite direction
• Calculating distance walked for each route in each novel and consolidating this numerical data in order to interrogate a more intensive theoretical framework around the Black flâneur

In considering a potential future use-case for this data set, I find myself considering the potential for covert deviance and reclamation of a space through the act of wandering. Julius in particular rarely takes a direct path; rather, he finds joy and enlightenment in the detour. The possibility of this reclamation in Black and especially Black female narratives is particularly meaningful. If, as de Certeau writes, “the act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered. At the most elementary level… it is a process of appropriation of the topographical system on the part of the pedestrian” (97), then walking the city, especially the spaces that are inaccessible in the maps of earlier novels in this project, becomes a potentially political act. The imposed routes of major thoroughfares, grid systems and subway lines are inherently representative of the regulatory abilities of the state -- a state that has historically disenfranchised Black people and women. As Katherine McKittrick writes, “interrogations and remappings provided by Black diaspora populations can incite new, or different, and perhaps more just, geographic stories” (xix).

I began this essay with an image of my city, a city where, in recent years, questions about walking, race, and segregation have come to the forefront. For a lot of Baltimoreans, and specifically for a lot of Black Baltimoreans, walking is not a choice but a necessity. In 2014, Maryland’s governor scrapped a long-awaited plan to extend the city’s train service, the Light Rail, out into majority-black West Baltimore, a move many believed to be motivated by concerns from white neighborhoods over increased mobility for poorer Black residents ( MacGillis ). The cancelled rail line, in a darkly ironic turn of events, was to have been called the Red Line. In fact, the violent unrest that racked the city after Freddie Gray’s death, which stemmed primarily from a standoff between police and high school students on the evening of April 27, 2015, began after students were caught by surprise by a mandated transport shutdown in the Mondawmin neighborhood (MacGillis). In cases like these, refusing to walk becomes the political protest, as walking is itself an imposition on the individual by the broader regulatory system.

This raises a question, then: exactly when is walking the city a form of protest, and when is it a simple observation of the surrounding world? When redlining and segregation deny many Black Americans access to mass transportation, does walking take on a new connotation? And under these circumstances, how does the Black flâneur reclaim the landscape, inciting the new geographical understandings McKittrick advocates? Can the Black flâneur ever transcend these fraught conditions to achieve the careless wandering of Baudelaire’s dandy, or are they always already implicated by the legacy of racism in America? These are questions without a simple answer; I simply hope this project can add a little something to the conversation.

1. Baldwin, James. If Beale Street Could Talk. 1974. Vintage Books, 2002.
2. Baudelaire, Charles. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. Translated by Jonathan Mayne, Phaiddon Press, 1970.
3. Cole, Teju. Open City. Random House, 2011.
4. Larsen, Nella. Quicksand. 1929.
5. MacGillis, “The Third Rail.” Places. March 2016.
6. McKittrick, Katherine. Demonic Grounds : Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, University of Minnesota Press, 2006. 
7. Sadler, Simon. The Situationist City. The MIT Press, 1998.
8. Thurman, Wallace. The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life. The Macaulay Company, 1929.
9. Wolff, Janet. "The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity.” Theory, Culture and Society, Vol. 3, 1985, pp. 37-46.