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Flying Africans, Black Pilots

This chapter resumes the exposition of the interface as a cultural form begun in Chapter 2, in relation to Conrad’s sea captains. In advancing that account into the middle decades of the twentieth century, it addresses a new technology: mechanically powered flight. The paradigmatic interface was now the cockpit of an aeroplane, rather than the quarterdeck of a ship. This is not a straightforward story of technological progress. In the United States, race had come to determine what is gained and lost by passage across the threshold of the interface. The chapter’s topic is the conjunction of interwar aviation technology with a version of the slavery-era legend of the Flying Africans which gained traction in African-American politics and culture (especially Marcus Garvey’s Back to Africa movement) in the 1920s, and subsequently caught the attention of blues singers like Lead Belly and writers like Sterling Brown, Claude McKay, and Ralph Ellison.