Michelle D. Commander's Critical Reads
Michelle D. Commander is an associate professor of English and Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee. She earned a PhD in American Studies and Ethnicity from the University of Southern California. Commander spent the 2012-2013 school year in Accra, Ghana, as a Fulbright Lecturer/Researcher, where she taught at the University of Ghana-Legon and completed follow-up research for Afro-Atlantic Flight. She is currently working on three projects: a book manuscript on the function of speculative ideologies and science in contemporary African American cultural production; a book-length project on Black counter-narratives of the U.S. South; and a creative nonfiction volume on African American mobility. Commander has also engaged in essay writing for public audiences, which has been cathartic and challenging. You can find her work at The Guardian and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Avidly channel. Michelle will discuss Afro-Atlantic Flight on Wednesday, November 8 at 6:00 pm.
The Souls of Black Folk, by W.E.B. Du Bois
Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America, by Saidiya Hartman
In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, by Christina Sharpe
Beloved, by Toni Morrison
The Price of the Ticket, by James Baldwin
Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture, by Hortense Spillers
Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, by Cedric Robinson
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, by Isabel Wilkerson
About Afro-Atlantic Flight: In Afro-Atlantic Flight, Commander analyzes what compels Black American cultural producers, travelers, and historical preservationists to journey toward imagined Africas in Ghana, Brazil, and the U.S. South in the post-1965 moment. This book offers significant reflections on Black American “flight” concerning the location of Africa, the possibilities for diasporan return, and the significance of refiguring and democratizing U.S. master narratives about slavery. It argues for the taking up of a speculative mindset not only as a liberating mode through which an individual can truly live otherwise, but also as a radical tool of analysis to properly address the contemporary resonances of slavery that exist across the Afro-Atlantic.
Related Titles
"I want to suggest this: that the majority for which everyone is seeking which must reassess and release us from our past and deal with the present and create standards worthy of what a man may be---this majority is you. No one else can do it. The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in."
From In Search of a Majority, chosen by bookseller Annie
"If we do not dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!"
"You know, and I know, that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon. We cannot be free until they are free"
"It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first idea was acceptance, the acceptance, totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are: in the light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is a commonplace. But this did not mean that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power: that one must never, in one's own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one's strength."
From "The Fire Next Time" and "Notes on a Native Son", recommended by bookseller Leslie
"A brilliant and stirring epic . . . Ms. Wilkerson...