Territories of the Soul

"Fearlessly following the roving movements of black desire, Nadia Ellis reformulates the classic diasporic tension between 'roots' and 'routes.' In gorgeous prose, she skillfully employs the insights of queer and affect studies to produce original readings of belonging and migration in Black Atlantic literature, music, and art. This is a timely and needed intervention."
- Tavia Nyong'o, author of The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory

"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

"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 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