“Afro-Atlantic Flight is instructive and deserves a spot among the growing wave of Black geographies literature.”
-- Bradley Hinger Antipode
“Commander has written a book that offers hope and optimism to Black Americans by reclaiming old wounds that surface in the contemporary moment with an alarming regularity, violent maliciousness, and/or callous indifference. With little doubt, she has made important methodological, theoretical, and political contributions to the disciplines of literary studies, American studies, performance studies, diaspora studies, cultural anthropology, and geography.”
-- R. Scott Carey Journal of Critical Race Inquiry
“Wide-ranging and dynamic. Afro-Atlantic Flight makes a valuable contribution to a number of fields that take up subjects such as the contemporary politics of black American belonging, travel, and speculative narrative traditions in black expressive culture.”
-- Stacie Selmon Mccormick Studies in the Novel
“Afro-Atlantic Flight successfully situates the fantastic and the speculative as longstanding modalities for black survival, resistance, and solidarity. . . . Commander has produced nuanced interdisciplinary work that sustains argument and methodology throughout.”
-- Daylanne K. English American Literary History
"Afro-Atlantic Flight has an ambitious premise and methodology, combining cultural studies, participant observation, and semistructured interviews. . . . An innovative aspect of the work is how it thinks beyond Africa as the sole site of cultural authenticity desired by African Americans."
-- Jocelyn Fenton Stitt Meridians
"Afro-Atlantic Flight innovatively examines literature and film that thematize returns to Africa alongside nonliterary phenomena. . . . Commander’s nuanced account of how black people deploy imaginings of Africa reclaims the concept of a homeland return as politically fruitful while avoiding the pitfalls of earlier Pan-Africanist movements."
-- Gabriella Friedman American Quarterly
"Afro-Atlantic Flight is a provocative and fascinating text that will also invite further study even as it engages and answers its own questions in critical and significant ways."
-- Susana M. Morris CLA Journal