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Territories of the Soul: Queered Belonging in the Black Diaspora
Nadia Ellis attends to African diasporic belonging as it comes into being through black expressive culture. Living in the diaspora, Ellis asserts, means existing between claims to land and imaginative flights unmoored from the earth--that is, to live within the territories of the soul. Drawing on the work of Jose Muñoz, Ellis connects queerness' utopian potential with diasporic aesthetics. Occupying the territory of the soul, being neither here nor there, creates in diasporic subjects feelings of loss, desire, and a sensation of a pull from elsewhere. Ellis locates these phenomena in the works of C.L.R. James, the testy encounter between George Lamming and James Baldwin at the 1956 Congress of Negro Artists and Writers in Paris, the elusiveness of the queer diasporic subject in Andrew Salkey's novel Escape to an Autumn Pavement, and the trope of spirit possession in Nathaniel Mackey's writing and Burning Spear's reggae. Ellis' use of queer and affect theory shows how geographies claim diasporic subjects in ways that nationalist or masculinist tropes can never fully capture. Diaspora, Ellis concludes, is best understood as a mode of feeling and belonging, one fundamentally shaped by the experience of loss.
Book Details
- Publisher: Duke University Press
- Publish Date: Sep 14th, 2015
- Pages: 256
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 9.13in - 6.02in - 0.34in - 0.78lb
- EAN: 9780822359289
- Categories: • Cultural & Ethnic Studies - American - African American & Bl• American - African American & Black
About the Author
Nadia Ellis is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.
More books by Nadia Ellis
What people are saying
Praise for this book
"Territories of the Soul offers a powerful reconceptualization of the African diaspora. . . . Ellis presents an important new way of seeing and writing diaspora, one that challenges queer theory and diaspora studies to explore the structural similarities of black diaspora and queer identity."--Leah Rosenberg "African American Review" (9/1/2017 12:00:00 AM)
"Territories of the Soul provides a compelling and interrogative look into black life and black culture and the idea of transcendence through the concept of the imagination and land spatiality in a queered diaspora."--Palimpsest Editorial Collective "Palimpsest" (3/1/2017 12:00:00 AM)