Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Inhabitants of the Deep: The Blueness of Blackness

Inhabitants of the Deep: The Blueness of Blackness

Howard, Jonathan

Paperback

Series: Black Outdoors: Innovations in the Poetics of Study

Literary CriticismBlack American Studies

ISBN10: 1478032618
ISBN13: 9781478032618
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: Nov 11 2025
Pages: 352
Weight: 1.10
Height: 0.87 Width: 5.98 Depth: 8.90
Language: English
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.

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