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Territories of the Soul: Queered Belonging in the Black Diaspora (2015)

“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.“

by Nadia Ellis

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Nadia Ellis  is Assistant Professor of English. She specializes in African diasporic, Caribbean, and postcolonial literatures and cultures. Her research traces the trajectories of literary and expressive cultures from the Caribbean to Britain to the United States and she is most intellectually at home at various intersections: between the diasporic and the queer; imperial identification and colonial resistance; performance and theory; migrancy and domesticity. She teaches classes on postcolonial literature and the city, black diasporic culture, queer theory, and US immigrant literature. Her book, Territories of the Soul: Queered Belonging in the Black Diaspora is forthcoming in 2015 from Duke UP. Published and upcoming essays are on such topics as Jamaican dancehall music; sexuality and the archive in postwar London; performance culture in the era of slavery Emancipation; and recent trends in Caribbean literary criticism. She is at work on a new book project, Diaspora’s Urban Sublime.

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