Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents vii
3. Introduction: Preliminary Vocabulary toward Black Specificity 1
4. Part I. On What It Means to Be Human
5. 1. Loving Black Flesh in Higher Education 15
6. 2. Breathing, Being, and Human Development 45
7. 3. “Look a Negro!” Explicating Self-Definition 73
8. Part II. Black Ontological Possibility: The Praxes of Self-Definition
9. 4. Invention: Narrating the Impossibility of Black Ontology 101
10. 5. Toward an Ontology of Black Intimacy 123
11. 6. Presence: Black Ontology as Image-Making and Imagination amid the “Uninhabitable” 145
12. 7. “Make it intact”: Toward Ethical Regard in Higher Education 169
13. Part III. Carcerality and the Radical Imagination of Self-Definition
14. 8. On the Possibility of Black Thought to Guide Educational Policy and Practice 199
15. 9. “I can’t be a pessimist”: Carcerality, Black Study, and Staging Black Futures 229
16. Gratitude 255
17. Notes 259
18. References 267
19. Index 285