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Across a range of literary texts, Black writers depict taking flight to escape systems of subordination from the Middle Passage and the plantation to the present-day racialized order. While flight, air, and aviation technologies have long held out the promise of freedom, they also function as devices for constraining Black mobility.
In The Black Aerial Imagination, Delali Kumavie examines how aviation and flight have shaped Black lives and the global Black cultural imagination. Considering works by African and diasporic writers such as Kofi Anyidoho, Toni Morrison, and Abdulrazak Gurnah, she argues that representations of aviation and air travel reveal the structures circumscribing Black existence. Kumavie interweaves narratives of flying Africans with the airlessness of the slave dungeons, aspirations for flight with the terrors of the air, and global airline travel with incarceration to show how stories of flight connect transatlantic slavery to the racialized violence of borders, the surveillance of international movement, and the postcolonial nation-state. Through deft, nuanced readings of African and African diasporic literature, this book provides vital new insights into the limits of aerial mobility and the persistence of anti-Black violence.
— Chandra D. Bhimull, author of Empire in the Air: Airline Travel and the African Diaspora
Kumavie’s interrogation of airplanes, airports, and air in the Black literary imagination is a stunning work of literary analysis and mobilities scholarship that upends the promise of global citizenship. A deeply researched study ranging from those that refused slavery’s hold and defied gravity through flight, the Jet Age, and the stowaway to the carceral logics of the airport, and working across a wide array of texts from Toni Morrison, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Ralph Ellison, and more, The Black Aerial Imagination will transform our understanding of flight, both mythic and machinic.
— Simone Browne, author of Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness
Through astute and rigorous analyses of a range of African diasporic literatures and expressive arts, Delali Kumavie offers brilliant meditations on air and aero mobility’s threat to and possibilities for Black life. With deep complexity, The Black Aerial Imagination soars!
— Sarah Jane Cervenak, author of Black Gathering: Art, Ecology, Ungiven Life
The imaginative breadth of Kumavie’s book and its breathtaking theoretical handle extend new life to both understudied and well-known cultural texts. Reorienting Black studies from land and water to air and from the automobile and the ship to the airplane, Kumavie's insightful study stakes a claim to multigenerational and transcontinental relevance.
— Cajetan Iheka, author of Horizontal Comparison: Africa, the Caribbean, and the Making of Black World Literature
The Black Aerial Imagination is the book Africana studies has been waiting for. Ambitious in scope, expansive in reach, and interdisciplinary in approach, it encompasses the diverse geographies of Africa, the Americas and Europe to examine how aviation technologies and flight have shaped Black lives—and Black 'livingness'—on a global scale.
— Deborah E. McDowell, author of "The Changing Same": Black Women's Literature, Criticism, and Theory
Kumavie’s The Black Aerial Imagination is field-changing. Offering a vertical, skyward axis with which to study global Black literatures, its richly textured readings move beyond long-held associations of aviation with freedom to consider how white supremacy and necropolitical control have shaped questions of air, flight, technology, and transit since the transatlantic slave trade.
— Matthew Omelsky, author of Fugitive Time: Global Aesthetics and the Black Beyond