Enrico Bruno

⦾ The Trope of Flight in African American Literature

⦾ Literature of the (Post)Plantation

⦾ Queer of Color Literature and Theory

Book Project:

Black Flights: Literary Revisions of the Flying African Myth

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The myth of the flying African—who breaks the shackles of slavery, leaps into the air, and flies back to Africa—appears in various forms in black literature, including contemporary fiction by prominent African American and Caribbean writers. My project relies on black American social and literary history since the end of the civil rights movement, the role—and evolution—of folklore within the African American literary tradition, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s concept of tropological revision to explore how black writers have revised and renegotiated the trope of literal human flight to address various forms of unfreedom in each author’s unique historical moment.

I argue that contemporary black writers use the motif in two related ways: first, they remind readers that America’s history is delineated by the intersections of regional U.S. geographies and ethnic histories, and that these intersections can speak against white hegemonic notions of national identity; second, they connect these national cultural narratives to the struggles of their individual protagonists, who must react against these narratives in order to reach personal ascension. Chapters of the project focus on writers including Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Percival Everett, Randall Kenan, Jesmyn Ward, and children's book authors Faith Ringgold and Christopher Myers.