Description
Book SynopsisMichelle D. Commander traces how black American artists, intellectuals, and travelers envision literal and figurative flight back to Africa through speculative literature and film and travel to cultural heritage sites as means to create a sense of homecoming, belonging, and connection with their ancestors, spiritual realm, and Africa.
Trade Review“
Afro-Atlantic Flight is instructive and deserves a spot among the growing wave of Black geographies literature.” -- Bradley Hinger * Antipode *
“Commander has written a book that offers hope and optimism to Black Americans by reclaiming old wounds that surface in the contemporary moment with an alarming regularity, violent maliciousness, and/or callous indifference. With little doubt, she has made important methodological, theoretical, and political contributions to the disciplines of literary studies, American studies, performance studies, diaspora studies, cultural anthropology, and geography.” -- R. Scott Carey * Journal of Critical Race Inquiry *
“Wide-ranging and dynamic.
Afro-Atlantic Flight makes a valuable contribution to a number of fields that take up subjects such as the contemporary politics of black American belonging, travel, and speculative narrative traditions in black expressive culture.” -- Stacie Selmon Mccormick * Studies in the Novel *
“
Afro-Atlantic Flight successfully situates the fantastic and the speculative as longstanding modalities for black survival, resistance, and solidarity. . . . Commander has produced nuanced interdisciplinary work that sustains argument and methodology throughout.” -- Daylanne K. English * American Literary History *
"
Afro-Atlantic Flight has an ambitious premise and methodology, combining cultural studies, participant observation, and semistructured interviews. . . . An innovative aspect of the work is how it thinks beyond Africa as the sole site of cultural authenticity desired by African Americans." -- Jocelyn Fenton Stitt * Meridians *
"
Afro-Atlantic Flight innovatively examines literature and film that thematize returns to Africa alongside nonliterary phenomena. . . . Commander’s nuanced account of how black people deploy imaginings of Africa reclaims the concept of a homeland return as politically fruitful while avoiding the pitfalls of earlier Pan-Africanist movements." -- Gabriella Friedman * American Quarterly *
"
Afro-Atlantic Flight is a provocative and fascinating text that will also invite further study even as it engages and answers its own questions in critical and significant ways." -- Susana M. Morris * CLA Journal *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1. Fantastic Flights: the Search of Ancestral Traces in Black Speculative Narratives 25
2. The Production of Homeland Returns: Misrecognitions and the Unsteady Path toward the Black Fantastic in Ghana 75
3. "We Love to be Africans": Saudade and Affective Performance in Bahia, Brazil 123
4. Crafting Symbolic Africas in a Geography of Silence: Return Travels to and the Renarrativization of the U.S. South 173
Conclusion. "Say Me My Name": Genetic Science and the Emerging Speculative Technologies in the Construction of Afro-Atlantic Reconciliatory Projects 221
Notes 235
Bibliography 253
Index 269
