“The next thing you know you’re flying among the stars”: Nostalgia, Heterotopia, and Mapping the City in African American Picture Books

Abstract

This essay posits that “hover-flying” texts constitute a mini-genre within African American picture books. Juxtaposing Faith Ringgold’s Tar Beach (1991) and Aunt Harriet’s Underground Railroad in the Sky (1992) with Christopher Myers’s Wings (2000) and Fly ! (2001), Jenkins argues that such books adapt the traditional flight motif in order to create new narratives about personal autonomy and social responsibility. These works illuminate Foucauldian theories of power and space, and respond to narratives of migration that are a crucial part of African American literary traditions.