Description
Book SynopsisProvides the first comprehensive treatment of the ways in which African American authors across three centuries have confronted the predicament of inhabiting space under conditions of bondage and structural oppression. The book examines how fourteen black authors have sought to transform a cartography that reflects white supremacist assumptions.
Trade Review“Decker’s Geographies of Flight is an intellectual, philosophical, political, social, cultural, and activist tour de force. A radical and revolutionary blueprint representing a call to scholarly arms in today’s world in which the ‘formidable structures of oppression’ are continuing to exert a dehumanizing stranglehold over US society, his pioneering methodology asks and answers the vitally important question to which we must all be held accountable: ‘How do we hear the descendant voices of those who write from spaces shaped by the African diaspora?’” —Celeste-Marie Bernier, author of Characters of Blood: Black Heroism in the Transatlantic Imagination
“Ambitious in scope, William Merrill Decker’s
Geographies of Flight: Phillis Wheatley to Octavia Butler asks us to reconsider the complex geographies of testimonial personhood in the development of the African American literary tradition over the longue durÉe. It offers insightful, detailed readings of the most significant autobiographical nonfiction and fiction in the canon.” —Edlie Wong, author of
Racial Reconstruction: Black Inclusion, Chinese Exclusion, and the Fictions of Citizenship Table of ContentsPrologue
Chapter 1: Signifying Space: Geographies of Domination and Resistance
Chapter 2: Voices from the Global South
Chapter 3: Slave State to Free
Chapter 4: Domestic Uplift and Escape Abroad
Chapter 5: Notes from Underground
Chapter 6: Next Worlds
Epilogue: Color Outside the Lines
Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography
Index
