Nadia Ellis

Image of Nadia Ellis.

Nadia Ellis

Type
Assistant Professor Fellow
Department
English
2010-11

Using the Anglophone Caribbean as a node to explore black transnational subjectivity, the research of Assistant Professor of English Nadia Ellis considers the ways in which writers from the region represent overlapping spaces of belonging. Titled "Territories of the Soul: Diaspora Affect and West Indian Independence," Professor Ellis’ book project claims that for writers from the West Indies, relationships to nations are often transmuted into relationships to territories, to multiple spaces imbued with immaterial import. State borders become far less salient than the feelings black communities in these spaces evoke. In their observations about what it means to be black in the first half of the twentieth century, says Professor Ellis, West Indian writers often think three places at once—the Caribbean, England, and the United States. Her book explores this integrated realm of the affective, the political, and the spatial with chapters devoted to CLR James’s autobiographical writing, George Lamming’s essays, Andrew Salkey’s Escape to an Autumn Pavement, the Caribbean Artists Movement, and the archive of migrancy and homosexuality in post-war Britain.