Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic

by Michelle D. Commander

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.

Genres: African American

296 pages, Paperback

Published March 24, 2017

About the author

Michelle D. Commander is associate director and curator of the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery at the Schomburg Center. She received her Ph.D. in American Studies and Ethnicity from the University of Southern California. Commander's research has centered on slavery and memory, diaspora studies, heritage tourism, literary studies, and Black social movements. Her first book Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic (Duke University Press, 2017) examines historic and contemporary Black American journeys toward imagined “Africas” in Bahia, Brazil, Ghana, and the U.S. South. Commander was awarded a Fulbright Teaching/Research grant to Ghana in 2012-2013 and she is a Ford Foundation scholar. Before joining the Schomburg Center, Commander served as a tenured associate professor of English and Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. A native of the midlands of South Carolina, she will publish Avidly Reads: Passages, a memoir on mobility and slavery’s afterlives in Lower Richland County, South Carolina, in February 2021.

Reviews

[Matt Sautman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Michelle Commander’s Afro-Atlantic Flight provides some excellent inquiry into how diaspora shapes subjectivity and informs movement, but I do wonder if this book’s broader focus set me up for some slight disappointment as, even if the literary analysis and ethnography compliment each other well, I think I would have preferred a more focused work. That is a relatively minor gripe, however.