Black Flight and Calculation in Baldwin and Morrison’s Aesthetic Resistance

• In Event: Black Aesthetics and the Political Imagination

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship among Black men’s naming, flight, and their improvised resistance to the gravitational pull of origin narratives within the aesthetic dimension of Blackness through James Baldwin’s Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. Their intertextual engagement with the myth of the Flying Africans functions as both an act of mourning for the Middle Passage and a critique of American folklore that casts technological progress as a linear narrative of modernity. Against the violent, plastic scales of being imposed by anti-Black universe, the chapter traces how ancestral linkages and practice of naming generate spaces that exceed Western geometric thinking and the ontologically closed system of Cartesian coordinates. Black men's flight becomes a refusal of the fixed spatial logic of Euclidean geometry and the absolute worldview that renders life measurable, exchangeable, and knowable within a geometrized order. In doing so, they draw on the revolutionary potential within African American folklore to articulate modes of relation that reimagine calculation and manhood, and challenge the single viewpoint of geometrized space.

Biographical Information

Song Namgung is a PhD candidate at Auburn University. Her research interests include African American literature, gender and sexuality studies, and interdisciplinary studies.

Author

• Song Namgung, Auburn University