Transatlantic Disbelonging

“Highlighting the complexity of Nigerian identity, Transatlantic Disbelonging collaborates with artists and writers to create a book that is simultaneously groundbreaking and devastatingly beautiful. An interdisciplinary, multimethod tour de force that thinks through national belonging and diasporic homemaking, the book addresses the need to center queer desires in African visual and literary culture. Nuanced, innovative, and poetic, Transatlantic Disbelonging brilliantly outlines vibrant, indigenous world-making practices that emerge out of new relationalities between black artists, spirit, and the precarious environment we live in.” - Hershini Bhana Young, author of Falling, Floating, Flickering: Disability and Differential Movement in African Diasporic Performance

“This innovative and poetic book makes a strong case for paying more attention to how artists in the diaspora use their artistic practices to effectively navigate their in-betweenness and queer notions of what constitutes ‘home.’ Bimbola Akinbola shows how Nigerian women artists refute the prototypical narrative of so-called tragic ‘return’ and instead reframe their displacement as an opportunity to create queer communities and refuse to be silenced by notions of what an artist, particularly a Nigerian woman, can represent or perform in public spaces.” - Uri McMillan, author of Mavericks of Style: The Seventies in Color

"Transatlantic Disbelonging is a world-tilting text that shines a light on the rigor of Nigerian women’s art history. . . . These artists are central to the global contemporary art world, where Black women’s experimental aesthetic practices are formative rather than marginal; Akinbola’s book gives these practices the rigorous attention they merit." - Alexandra M. Thomas, Hyperallergic