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Inhabitants of the Deep
The Blueness of Blackness
Language:
English
Published/Copyright:
2025
About this book
In Inhabitants of the Deep, Jonathan Howard undertakes a black ecocritical study of the deep in African American literature. Howard contends that the deep—a geographic formation that includes oceans, rivers, lakes, and the notion of depth itself—provides the diffuse subtext of black literary and expressive culture. He draws on texts by authors ranging from Olaudah Equiano and Herman Melville to Otis Redding and August Wilson to present a vision of blackness as an ongoing inhabitation of the deep that originates with and persists beyond Middle Passage. From captive Africans’ first tentative encounter with the landless realm of the Atlantic to the ground on which black peoples still struggle to stand, the deep is what blackness has known throughout the changing same of black life and death. Yet this radical exclusion from the superficial Western world, Howard contends, is more fully apprehended not as the social death hailed by the slave ship but as the black ecological life hailed by a blue planet.
Reviews
“Jonathan Howard’s Inhabitants of the Deep is a brilliant, rigorous, and sophisticated account of Black life. At the crossroads of ecopoetics, social history, and cultural criticism, Howard explores how the waterways of history provide fertile ground for understanding Black life not as social death but rather as deep living. While offering new critical terms and deeply engaging with contemporary critical theory, this book is a wholly unique yet also deeply grounded intellectual intervention.”
-- Imani Perry, author of Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People
-- Imani Perry, author of Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People
“Where to begin with blackness? Why not the deep, the grave indeterminate poetic of water? So it is that Howard argues genesis and origin(s), turning to aquatic sightings and citings, reckoning with trace and longing and errancy and errantry. In doing this, he animates literariness through the ecologies water makes possible. Here,deep modifies study, voice, imagination; here, in this book, are some fugitive provocations—what a ride it is to think with them.”
-- Kevin Quashie, author of Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being
-- Kevin Quashie, author of Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being
"Inhabitants of the Deep is rich in luminous and . . . deep thought. . . . [It] deserves widely to be read."
-- William Brown Ethnic and Racial Studies
-- William Brown Ethnic and Racial Studies
Topics
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Frontmatter
i -
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Contents
ix -
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Prologue: the blueness of blackness
xi -
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Introduction: the deep
1 -
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1 deep humanities
31 -
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2 deep study
75 -
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3 deep voice
117 -
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4 deep imagination
139 -
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5 deep life
167 -
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6 deep vision
195 -
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Epilogue: ankle deep
259 -
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Acknowledgments: deep gratitude
265 -
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Notes
269 -
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Bibliography
299 -
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Index
309
Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
October 3, 2025
eBook ISBN:
9781478061489
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook ISBN:
9781478061489
Keywords for this book
black studies; Middle Passage; ecocriticism; environmental humanities; blue humanities; oceanic studies; black ecologies; social death; ecological life; Equiano; The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano; National Museum of African American History and Culture; submersion narrative; slave narrative; plot; Otis Redding; Frederick Douglass; Olaudah Equiano; Henry Bibb; stand your ground; whiteness; blackness; transatlantic slave trade; Moby-Dick; Pip; afropessimism; Du Bois; sound studies; Paule Marshall; Ralph Ellison; Gaston Bachelard; material imagination; Louis Armstrong; August Wilson; Century Cycle; black ecological life; Gem of the Ocean; Emmett Till; Mamie Till-Mobley; visuality; Burr Oak Cemetery
Audience(s) for this book
For an expert adult audience, including professional development and academic research
