Delali Kumavie

Delali Kumavie received her PhD in English from Northwestern University at Evanston in 2020. Her dissertation, “Dreams of Flight: Literary Mapping of Black Geographies through Air, Airplane, and Airport,” examines the intersection of blackness with aviation in African and African diasporic literature. Reading literary works from Africa and the African Diaspora, this project augments conventional understandings of flight, broadly speaking, as escape or lightness, by exploring texts that associate the much-vaunted “freedom” of flight with threat, stasis, and death. Building upon recent black feminist scholarship on surveillance, migration, and transnationality as well as critical work on modernity and technology, “Dreams of Flight” attends to the long historical and geopolitical entanglements between the air, airplane and airports as interconnected nodes of analysis. Framed as a literary genealogy of the relationship between blackness and aviation, this project expands the spatial and temporal terrain of blackness by drawing on African and African diasporic literary and theoretical traditions to provide a new approach to the study of black space. Kumavie’s work has been supported by the American Association of University Women, the Buffett Institute, and the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies among others.