Afro-Atlantic Flight

Michelle D. Commander is Associate Professor of English at the University of Tennessee.

“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)

• Acknowledgments  ixIntroduction  11. Fantastic Flights: the Search of Ancestral Traces in Black Speculative Narratives  252. The Production of Homeland Returns: Misrecognitions and the Unsteady Path toward the Black Fantastic in Ghana  753. "We Love to be Africans": Saudade and Affective Performance in Bahia, Brazil  1234. Crafting Symbolic Africas in a Geography of Silence: Return Travels to and the Renarrativization of the U.S. South  173Conclusion. "Say Me My Name": Genetic Science and the Emerging Speculative Technologies in the Construction of Afro-Atlantic Reconciliatory Projects  221Notes  235Bibliography  253Index  269