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Inhabitants of the Deep

The Blueness of Blackness
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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 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 the black ecological life hailed by a blue planet.
Jonathan Howard is Assistant Professor of African American Studies and English at Yale University.
Prologue. The Blueness of Blackness xi Introduction. The Deep 1 1. Deep Humanities 31 2. Deep Study 75 3. Deep Voice 117 4. Deep Imagination 139 5. Deep Life 167 6. Deep Vision 195 Epilogue. Ankle Deep 259 Acknowledgments. Deep Gratitude 265 Notes 269 Bibliography 299 Index
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