Territories of the Soul

Queered Belonging in the Black Diaspora

Nadia Ellis

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780822359289, 9780822359159
• eBook ISBN: 9780822375104
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction - The Queer Elsewhere of Black Diaspora
• One - The Attachments of C. L. R. James
• Two - The Fraternal Agonies of Baldwin and Lamming
• Three - Andrew Salkey and the Queer Diasporic
• Four - Burning Spear and Nathaniel Mackey at Large
• Epilogue - Dancehall’s Urban Possessions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index