Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic

In Afro-Atlantic Flight, Michelle D. Commander traces how post-civil rights Black American artists, intellectuals, and travelers envision literal and figurative flights back to Africa as a means of healing the dispossession caused by the transatlantic slave trade.

Through ethnographic, historical, literary, and film analyses, Commander explores how cultural producers such as Octavia Butler, Thomas Allen Harris, and Saidiya Hartman engage with speculative ideas about slavery, the spiritual realm, and Africa, helping to shape the imagination that inspires future return journeys.

Commander also examines Black Americans’ cultural heritage tourism in and migration to Ghana, Bahia, Brazil, and various sites of enslavement in the U.S. South. She investigates how a range of actors construct ideas of “Africa” while challenging dominant historical narratives.

Compellingly, these physical journeys do not always fulfill Black Americans’ individual desires for homecoming and liberation. Commander therefore turns her attention to the revolutionary possibilities of psychic and speculative returns, arguing for the development of a Pan-Africanist perspective that more effectively addresses the ongoing impact and contemporary meanings of slavery throughout the Afro-Atlantic world.