Nadia Ellis’ Territories of the Soul: Queered Belonging in the Black Diaspora brilliantly articulates how black diasporic belonging transcends dominant understandings of identity based on locality/time/space. By analyzing the modalities in which “difficulty and loss” (5) become affective spaces of communal negation, Ellis explores the “gap between here and there” where the black diasporic subject’s aesthetic/spiritual practices neither inhabit the present condition nor reaches the horizon of future possibilities. Black diaspora belonging does not operate within the realm of relationality based on sameness or likeness (72) but through the very “persistent sense of the insufficiency of existing modes of belonging is matched by an awareness that new forms remain inspiringly elusive.”(3) Ellis locates this shared feeling of insufficiency in 20th century black diasporic cultural practices in the work of James Baldwin, Andrew Salkey, Nathaniel Mackey, C.L.R. James and Ebony Patterson, in a desire for an “outside” empire, colonization, domination, and other forms of violence projected on the black body. Ellis situates this longing for an “outside” through José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia, in which loss and belonging inhabit queerness as “that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough” (100).
Nadia Ellis begins Territories of the Soul: Queered Belonging in the Black Diaspora with a brief exploration of Stuart Hall’s diasporic musings of jazz, through its profound impact on his writing as a cultural practice that was not based on desires to go to a specific locale (2). Hall did not necessarily want to study jazz in America, rather “it was a ‘country of the mind.’ The main thing was to be able, in one’s mind, one’s imagination, to have the possibility to be elsewhere.” (2). In being neither here nor there, but rather elsewhere; Ellis articulates this “elsewhere” by utilizing a “queer utopian hermeneutic” in order to “explore diasporic aesthetics and subjectivity” (3) insofar that diasporic belonging dwells in the lack or “insufficiency, in haunting gap between here and there.” Diaspora, like Stuart Hall’s “elsewhere,” imparts a rejection of aesthetic practices as inherited in a specific time and place or community, yet resides in the potentiality that new ways of being are still yet to come.
In the same vein as Hall’s “elsewhere,” Nadia Ellis expounds on the ways reading C.L.R. James’ Beyond a Boundary in conjunction with American Civilization exemplify James’ negotiating of his own positionality within different affective terrains of the political, national and transnational. James’ “attachments” to both West Indian male cricket players and mostly white American film actresses serve as conflicted sites of pain and desire. While the game of cricket played in the West Indies represented a broader British colonial embedment to James’ Trinidadian nationalism; American films operated as an affective mode in which James could both articulate his optimism for a “better” as a “there” that he could desire belonging to. These politically inconsistent attachments with black cricket players and white American women displace any sort of unified cultural practice or desire based a sort of “sameness” of a universal black subject.
In “Andrew Salkey and the Queer Diasporic,” Ellis examines Salkey’s Escape to Autumn Pavement in order to articulate the queer diasporic subject as one that always evades discovery and containment. Salkey’s novel depicts Johnnie Sorbert, a Jamaican born immigrant living in London who is constantly torn between his attraction to a married woman named Fiona and a gay man named Dick. The novel concludes without Johnnie “choosing” between the two characters, and in many ways eluding any sort of “capture ” that comes with such a decision. Johnnie instead escapes into the city of London, disavowing any stable identity marker. As such, Johnnie’s diasporic belonging by never belonging to either England or Jamaica nor straight or gay dichotomies.
Ellis’ last chapter, “Burning Spear and Nathaniel Mackey at Large,” perhaps best encompasses the ways in which diasporic ephemeral desire or the “beyond” the positionality is not “neither here nor there” but present in both the here and there. the fleeting movement of spiritual practices, where a subject-spirit binary cannot be discernable, spiritual possessions inhabit and locate oneself in both ‘the here’ as well as ‘the there’(147). Black spiritual practices “come to be intimately incorporated into a black diasporic subject’s own practice and person”(149) insofar that they are accessible to the diaspora in ways that exceed the structural (149). In this way, “the spiritual” gives way to a black diaspora subject that is not always being positioned by the systematic or institutional, but in ways that are “expansive, elusive, unbounded”(149). It is with this movement of black longing and desire that Ellis invites us to think of the more ways in which the black diasporic subject belongs in queered spaces that are never not “elsewhere.”
Nadia Ellis’ work is a necessary intervention in affect theory and diaspora studies. She compels readers to think of black diasporic belonging as that which is never not “elsewhere.” That desire or call from “elsewhere” occupies the “territory of the soul.” In this way, Ellis reconceptualized emotional responses to loss and desire that are embodied and felt but not always understood in the tangible sense; the “elsewhere” transcends notions of space, time and place through the affective realm of diaspora belonging in the wake of loss. The book’s use of literature art and musical performances enables the reader to find their own ways of belonging to the diaspora and the works of the diasporic subjects expounded in the book. Ellis provides us with a pedagogy of belonging that shows there are always more ways of belonging that are elusive and unbounded. Diaspora belonging is limitless; it is queer in its utterance of loss and desire.
Ellis’ “elsewhere” is always an articulation of the sacred as it extends beyond a totalizing rendering of the social order of the world. Though best expressed in “Burning Spear and Nathaniel Mackey at Large”, Ellis otherwise lacks further engagement in the ways in which the “here and there” as binary or negation is always already “of the sacred” insofar that it is a feeling or desire. This desire is sacred or spiritual as one embodies the insufficiencies of the world as we know it, and creates alternative ways/worlds that are wedged through understandings of the sacred. This is to say, the sacred is the spiritual and the limitless possibilities of being together with the divine and the human.
Perhaps if Ellis instead began the book by considering how the black diaspora subject’s practices of the sacred are unbounded yet accessible and communal to persons of the diaspora, one could better understand how notions of the sacred transcend the locality of the diasporic subject. By explicitly naming the “elsewhere” as sacred and spiritual throughout the entirety of the book and not just the last chapter, Ellis’ argument would have been more effective. The “elsewhere” is the sacred, that thing that propels us to imagine a another world that the “here and there” cannot realize. The “elsewhere” is where that “sacred and mundane,” cannot exist independently, but rather becomes the very unrealized potentiality that one’s desire meets a communal longing and practice.
In conclusion, Territories of the Soul: Queered Belonging in the Black Diaspora relies on the sacred and spiritual, the “elsewhere” experience to situate her subjects as belonging to a “common” diaspora. This book might be most useful to those who seek to theorize conceptions of the sacred in post-colonial black subjects’ negotiation of empire and native, colonization and local, the systematic religious and the sacred. However, Territories of the Soul compels a multitude of interdisciplinary thinkers to theorize the sacred and the diaspora in ways that necessitate a theory of the spiritual and religiosity. If anything, Nadia Ellis urges those who presuppose the secular without attention to the sacred to rethink loss and belonging through the modality of the sacred, which is always already “elsewhere.”
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