Dreams of Flight: Literary Mapping of Black Geographies through the Air, Airplane, and Airport

Kumavie, Francisca  Delali

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-eqze-f935

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Dreams of Flight: Literary Mapping of Black Geographies through the Air, Airplane, and Airport

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After spending most of her flight back to Ghana writing a letter to her estranged lover, Sissie, Ama Ata Aidoo’s protagonist in Our Sister Killjoy, observes the actions of her fellow passengers and reads the atmosphere onboard the airplane as that of “another human market-place.” Sissie’s statement transports into her postcolonial present the past of the transatlantic slave trade, connecting air travel and its technology to slavery and its transformation of Black lives. This dissertation, Dreams of Flight: Literary Mappings of Black Geographies through the Air, Airplane, and Airport, argues that the air, airplane, and airport are crucial sites for examining Black travel and mobility. It reads black literatures written in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, such as Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang’s Cape Coast Castle, Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Ralph Ellison’s “A Party Down at the Square” and Kojo Laing’s Woman of the Aeroplanes, to posits that no matter the era, region, or genre, black writers have understood the development of commercial and military aviation as entangled with the condition of blackness. Drawing on the insights of Black Studies on geography, space and time, Postcolonial Studies on globality and transnationality, Black/African feminist analytics, and studies of the Black diaspora, Dreams of Flight writes against the conventional understanding of Black literary expressions, which tend to see flight, broadly speaking, as escape, lightness or freedom, and aviation as distant from the condition of blackness globally. The sites of the air, airplane, and airport have been central to the politics and poetics of space and cross-spatial mobility in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Dreams of flight shows how Black writers viewed race and its historical and geopolitical entanglements with the technology of the airplane and airport, and its transformation of the mythologies of flying into technological innovation. It takes these sites of air travel as material, elemental, historical, geopolitical systems that converge at the site of the black body. By taking air as space, and fundamental in the enactment of speech, it investigates how black contemporary travel and migration are intricately woven into slavery and its afterlives. Further, it highlights how the airplane, in proximity to blackness, fractures the linearity of techno-modernity by creating uncomfortable simultaneities between black life and experiences, and developments in commercial and military aviation. The airports, situated at the edge of the nation-state, shows how the hauntings of extractive imperialism, migration, and the nation’s anxiety/desire take center stage. It brings together the air, airplane, and airport to interrogate the material conditions necessary for air travel, and the kinds of transformation that air travel engenders in communities and individuals offer us alternatives ways for understanding black mobility globally and historically.

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