Michelle D. Commander – författare

In Afro-Atlantic Flight Michelle D. Commander traces how post-civil rights Black American artists, intellectuals, and travelers envision literal and figurative flight back to Africa as a means by which to heal the dispossession caused by the slave trade. Through ethnographic, historical, literary, and filmic analyses, Commander shows the ways that cultural producers such as Octavia Butler, Thomas Allen Harris, and Saidiya Hartman engage with speculative thought about slavery, the spiritual realm, and Africa, thereby structuring the imaginary that propels future return flights.  She goes on to examine Black Americans’ cultural heritage tourism in and migration to Ghana; Bahia, Brazil; and various sites of slavery in the US South to interrogate the ways that a cadre of actors produces “Africa” and contests master narratives. Compellingly, these material flights do not always satisfy Black Americans’ individualistic desires for homecoming and liberation, leading Commander to focus on the revolutionary possibilities inherent in psychic speculative returns and to argue for the development of a Pan-Africanist stance that works to more effectively address the contemporary resonances of slavery that exist across the Afro-Atlantic.

In Afro-Atlantic Flight Michelle D. Commander traces how post-civil rights Black American artists, intellectuals, and travelers envision literal and figurative flight back to Africa as a means by which to heal the dispossession caused by the slave trade. Through ethnographic, historical, literary, and filmic analyses, Commander shows the ways that cultural producers such as Octavia Butler, Thomas Allen Harris, and Saidiya Hartman engage with speculative thought about slavery, the spiritual realm, and Africa, thereby structuring the imaginary that propels future return flights.  She goes on to examine Black Americans’ cultural heritage tourism in and migration to Ghana; Bahia, Brazil; and various sites of slavery in the US South to interrogate the ways that a cadre of actors produces “Africa” and contests master narratives. Compellingly, these material flights do not always satisfy Black Americans’ individualistic desires for homecoming and liberation, leading Commander to focus on the revolutionary possibilities inherent in psychic speculative returns and to argue for the development of a Pan-Africanist stance that works to more effectively address the contemporary resonances of slavery that exist across the Afro-Atlantic.

In Afro-Atlantic Flight Michelle D. Commander traces how post-civil rights Black American artists, intellectuals, and travelers envision literal and figurative flight back to Africa as a means by which to heal the dispossession caused by the slave trade. Through ethnographic, historical, literary, and filmic analyses, Commander shows the ways that cultural producers such as Octavia Butler, Thomas Allen Harris, and Saidiya Hartman engage with speculative thought about slavery, the spiritual realm, and Africa, thereby structuring the imaginary that propels future return flights.  She goes on to examine Black Americans’ cultural heritage tourism in and migration to Ghana; Bahia, Brazil; and various sites of slavery in the US South to interrogate the ways that a cadre of actors produces “Africa” and contests master narratives. Compellingly, these material flights do not always satisfy Black Americans’ individualistic desires for homecoming and liberation, leading Commander to focus on the revolutionary possibilities inherent in psychic speculative returns and to argue for the development of a Pan-Africanist stance that works to more effectively address the contemporary resonances of slavery that exist across the Afro-Atlantic.

Explores the powerful ways in which visual art has long provided its own rich outlet for protest, commentary, escape, and perspective for African Americans.This important book showcases the potent role of visual art in African American history and culture. Featuring Black artists working in a range of media, from photography to sculpture to painting—including Amy Sherald, Benny Andrews, Sheila Pree Bright, Bisa Butler, Charles Alston, Elizabeth Catlett, Shaun Leonardo, and David Hammons, to name just a few—the book considers art that exemplifies resilience in times of conflict, as well as the ritual of creation, and the defiant pleasure of healing.Reckoning, based on the exhibition of the same name at the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), explores the ongoing struggles Black Americans have faced in their pursuit to enjoy the fundamental rights and freedoms promised in the Constitution to citizens of the United States. Drawn from the museum’s permanent collection, the featured works respond to the dual crises of Covid-19 and systemic racism that shaped 2020, a period that has been called one of reckoning, as the world witnessed the killing of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other African Americans, leading to some of the largest protests in US history.

Discover the most significant museum collection chronicling African American life, history, and culture, revealing centuries of creativity, resistance, determination, and joy.At the National Museum of African American History and Culture’s dedication ceremony in 2016, civil rights activist and venerated congressman John Lewis proclaimed, “Oh, say! What a dream can do!” This volume, published to celebrate the Museum’s tenth anniversary, captures that vision through stories told by those collecting and caring for the objects. From the historically profound, such as the miraculous recovery and resurrection of a WWII–era plane used to train Tuskegee Airmen; to the searingly poignant personal keepsakes belonging to the famed abolitionist Harriet Tubman, whose family carefully preserved them for generations.The breadth of the collection is extraordinary, spanning visual art, photography, film, and historical artifacts from the seventeenth century to the present. Each object carries its own story and distinctive journey, reflecting the collaboration, care, and commitment required to bring this national museum to life. Other incredible highlights include the Johnson Publishing Company’s famed Ebony Test Kitchen, Chuck Berry’s red Cadillac, and Radio Raheem’s iconic boombox from Spike Lee’s 1989 film Do the Right Thing. These powerful stories of community, connection, resilience, and remembrance reflect the nation’s story and demonstrate, in enduring and profound ways, what a dream can do.

Celebrates the expansive creativity of Black artists who have contributed to the rich fabric of abstraction through artworks in the collection of the National Museum of African American History and Culture.This beautifully illustrated volume reveals the profound range and depth of abstract art created by African American artists, from the twentieth century to present day. Through the artworks in the Museum’s permanent collection, Revelation interrogates the stakes of Black artists working in abstraction. It features works that span from subtly suggestive forms to entirely nonrepresentational expressions, including those by artists working in the 1960s and ’70s like Ed Clark, Sam Gilliam, Alma Thomas, and Jack Whitten and by contemporary voices such as Theaster Gates, Rashid Johnson, Jennie C. Jones, Simone Leigh, and Julie Mehretu.After an introduction by Michelle D. Commander, Tuliza Fleming establishes the significance of abstraction to the building of the Museum’s visual art collection and Sarah Gordon demonstrates the powerful connection of artists’ materials to the human body. Following the essays are five thematic plate sections—Natural World Refracted, The Shape of Sound, Colored Surfaces, Dreams Deferred, and Transcendent Visions—each introduced by conversations that Janet Dees shares with a dynamic group of artists, curators, and scholars. Through this, Revelation highlights the many ways abstraction has not only been used as a formalist vehicle to explore shape, color, and form but also as a language of cultural memory, identity, and transformation.

"What is the value of Black life in America?"In Avidly Reads Passages, Michelle D. Commander plies four freighted modes of travel—the slave ship, train, automobile, and bus—to map the mobility of her ancestors over the past five centuries. In the process, she refreshes the conventional American travel narrative by telling an urgent story about how history shapes what moves us, as well as what prevents so many Black Americans from moving or being moved. Anchored in her maternal kin's long history on and alongside plantations in rural South Carolina, Commander explores her family members' ability and inability to navigate safely through space, time, and emotion, detailing how Black lives were shaped by the actual vehicles that promised an escape from the confines of American racism, yet nearly always failed to deliver on those promises. Using personal and public archives, Avidly Reads Passages unfolds distinct histories of transatlantic slavery ships, the possibilities presented by rail lines in the Reconstruction South, the fateful legacies of school busing, and the ways that Black Americans attempted to negotiate their automobility, including through the use of road and travel compendiums such as Travelguide and The Negro Motorist Green Book. In order to understand the intricacies of slavery and its aftermath, Commander began her exploration with the hope of engaging with the difficult evidences and stubborn gaps in her family's genealogy; what she produced is a biting and elegiac reflection on working-class life in the Black South. Commander demonstrates that the forms of intimidation, brutality, surveillance, and restriction used to control Black mobility have merely evolved since slavery, marking Black life writ large in America, with neither the passage of time nor the passage of laws assuring true and adequate racial progress. Despite this bleak observation, Commander catalogs and celebrates, through affecting stories about her beloved South Carolina community, the compelling strivings of Southern Black people to survive by holding on firmly to family, and their faith that new worlds could be imagined, created, and traveled to someday.Part of the Avidly Reads series, this slim book gives us a new way of looking at American culture. With the singular blend of personal reflection and cultural criticism featured in the series, Avidly Reads Passages offers a unique lens through which to capture the intricacies of Black life.