Flight Lines (A Poetics of Black Space)

In Flight Lines, Elleza Kelley argues that African American art and writing make visible the unmappable dimensions of black space, not simply by depicting black worlds but by registering how black spatial praxis takes form under conditions of racial enclosure. Reading across literature and visual art, from W. E. B. Du Bois and Zora Neale Hurston to Faith Ringgold, Romare Bearden, and Gwendolyn Brooks, Kelley tracks spatial knowledge across media and contends that where mediums meet, black aesthetic form emerges as a crucial site for conceptualizing black space in the United States. Moving from Southern landscapes shaped by racialized property to the postmigration geographies of Harlem and Chicago, Flight Lines follows fences, railroads, blocks, apartments, and rooftops as sites where enclosure is contested, improvised on, and transformed. Proposing that black space and black form are mutually constitutive, Kelley shows how black aesthetics illuminate the racial operations of enclosure while preserving alternative ways of inhabiting, sensing, and remaking racialized worlds.