The Black Aerial Imagination: Aviation and Flight in African and Diasporic Literature (HC) (2026)

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.