Following the innovative collection Spill, Alexis Pauline Gumbs's M Archive-the second book in a planned experimental triptych-is a series of poetic artifacts that speculatively documents the persistence of Black life following a worldwide cataclysm. Engaging with the work of the foundational Black feminist theorist M. Jacqui Alexander, and following the trajectory of Gumbs's acclaimed visionary fiction short story "Evidence," M Archive is told from the perspective of a future researcher who uncovers evidence of the conditions of late capitalism, antiblackness, and environmental crisis while examining possibilities of being that exceed the human. By exploring how Black feminist theory is already after the end of the world, Gumbs reinscribes the possibilities and potentials of scholarship while demonstrating the impossibility of demarcating the lines between art, science, spirit, scholarship, and politics.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a poet, independent scholar, and activist. She is the author of Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity, also published by Duke University Press; coeditor of Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines; and the founder and director of Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind, an educational program based in Durham, North Carolina.
A Note ix From the Lab Notebooks of the Last Experiments 3 Archive of Dirt: What We Did 31 Archive of Sky: What We Became 71 Archive of Fire: Rate of Change 89 Archive of Ocean: Origin 105 Baskets (Possible Futures Yet to Be Woven) 133 Memory Drive 185 Acknowledgments 213 Notes 217 Periodic Kitchen Table of Elements 227
"M Archive adds to and extends the critical work being done around breath, breathing, and blackness. And in so doing, it gives us a reason to breathe - independently and collectively - again." - Sasha Panaram (New Black Man (In Exile)) "Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a literary treasure. M Archive, the second book in an innovative trilogy that began with Spill, is evidence of her brilliance." (Bitch) (Starred Review) "Groundbreaking.... This is an impressive archive 'written in collaboration with the survivors' and the mythology that Gumbs develops from the artifacts of future black life and memory works to reveal an existence 'on the verge of regenerating the cells that would let us dream deep enough to remember.'" (Publishers Weekly) "The end of the world is no joke! This text is clearly ambitious. More compendium than chronicle, the writing is poetic, dense, and often solemn with glimmers of dark wit." - Gabrielle Civil (Full Stop) "Offers a set of necessary and stimulating interventions . . . A generous work that challenges dominant views that assume that ancestral speculative work has no place in feminist theory." - Chandra Frank (Feminist Formations) "At turns lush and awesome, in ways that make the eyes gleam and the mind crackle with electricity, in ways that devastate and leave the spirit raw with overlain feelings of complicity and responsibility, and loving, always loving, always loving in, between, and across every single word-the beautiful and daring writing of M Archive imperatively continues the constellar work of radical Black feminism's ongoing project of 'imagining the unimaginable.'" - John Murillo III (Make) "[G]round-breaking. . . . Gumbs's trilogy embraces the lyric beauty in the acts of naming, remembering, and finding one's way back to the source. . . . Reading Gumbs's books feels like reading an archive that will someday, who knows maybe even someday soon, usher in an era of radical transformation." - Kathryn Nuernberger (West Branch) "The prose poetry collection M Archive is a rich exploration of the elements, and of Black artistry lovingly and bodily engaged with dirt, sky, ocean, and fire in a post-apocalyptic world of new and old relations. It's a book full of insights and offerings for living more consciously, for creating healing spaces in a changing world." - Petra Kuppers (Shelf Awareness) "This is the second collection of a triptych that breaks so many molds in form, language, and perspectives. Alexis Pauline Gumbs ponders the landscape in a post-apocalyptic world, particularly for Black people that face environmental racism and dying capitalism. In the context of embodying Black feminist theory, the poems point to race, politics, feminism, healing, and the environment. It is a fresh approach to understanding the many nuances of environmentalism." - Dorsia Smith Silva (Literary Hub)
