Flight Lines

“We enter Flight Lines and meet the world differently—we see the hitherto undetectable; perceiving, for example, not only the interior and exterior of a train and the line it travels, but the ground it shakes and the air it parts. Elleza Kelley expands our understanding of black writers’ and visual artists’ praxis, their formal innovations, and the complex geographies from and in which black people live and create.” - Christina Sharpe, author of Ordinary Notes

“Flight Lines breaks the boundaries between black aesthetics and the field of Black Geographies. This phenomenal book uncovers a long tradition of black spatial praxis in African American literature and visual art. Elleza Kelley demonstrates that the art of black space-making refuses the logics of possession and property. This brilliant rethinking of black space adds vital new dimensions to Black Studies.” - Margo Crawford, author of Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics

“In Flight Lines Elleza Kelley not only redraws typical geographic patterns, she offers a method of inquiry that brings into sharp focus spatial formations—the textured and unlivable, the collaborative and moving, the almost forgotten, the trimmed and sheared—that are rearranged by and through expressions of black livingness. Here, Kelley patiently works through how the aesthetics of black placemaking unsettles spatial-intellectual proprietorship and the wherewithal of enclosure, just as she narrates the production of space anew.” - Katherine McKittrick, author of Dear Science and Other Stories