Overview

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 Munoz, 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.

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Reviews

Territories of the Soul provides a compelling and interrogative look into black life and black culture and the idea of transcendence through the concept of the imagination and land spatiality in a queered diaspora. -- Palimpsest Editorial Collective * Palimpsest * Territories of the Soul offers a powerful reconceptualization of the African diaspora. . . . Ellis presents an important new way of seeing and writing diaspora, one that challenges queer theory and diaspora studies to explore the structural similarities of black diaspora and queer identity. -- Leah Rosenberg * African American Review *

Territories of the Soul is a work of such profligate complexity and counter-intuitive imagination that it defies stable definition. It aims, above all, to figure a queer aesthetic of diasporic sensibility that exceeds any simple dialectic of belonging and displacement, sameness and difference. Through its uncanny juxtapositions it challenges us to think against our normative assumptions of the limits and satisfactions of black identification. Nadia Ellis has written a sensuously queer manifesto of diasporic loss and utopia. --David Scott, author of Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice

Author Information

Nadia Ellis is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.

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