Black Gathering: Art, Ecology, Ungiven Life

Sarah Jane Cervenak

Published by Duke University Press 2021

Black Gathering

Art, Ecology, Ungiven Life

Sarah Jane Cervenak

In the series Black Outdoors: Innovations in the Poetics of Study

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478021773

Overview
Contents

About this book

Sarah Jane Cervenak traces how Black artists and writers who create alternative spaces for Black people to gather free from those Enlightenment philosophies that presume Black people and land as given to enclosure and ownership.

Author / Editor information

Sarah Jane Cervenak is Associate Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and of African American and African Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. She is the author of Wandering: Philosophical Performances of Racial and Sexual Freedom, also published by Duke University Press.

Reviews

“Extending her rich study of philosophical praxis and the racial politics of wandering, Sarah Jane Cervenak explores daily practices and real-life social happenings as frames for navigating the discourses of death, subjection, and, most vitally, life. Surely this is a gathering; surely this is a beautiful work in Black aesthetics.”

-- Kevin Quashie, author of Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being

“Foregrounding fugitive existence in the reading of key literary texts and artworks, Black Gathering offers a powerful account of how Blackness (as it signals the without of modern representation) releases humans and nonhumans from their modern aesthetic enclosure (as subject and object of uncommitted contemplation) and juridic-economic misfortune (as subject and object of expropriation and extraction).”

-- Denise Ferreira da Silva, author of Toward a Global Idea of Race

“[Black Gathering], laid out in a captivating manner, moves from engagement with the concept of an earthly home and expands into works which explore the cosmos as well as parallel worlds. . . . This book will be of interest to advanced scholars studying the theory of African American artistic contributions.”

-- Laura Christine Haynes ARLIS/NA

“One of the key strengths of the book is its own ‘gathering’: that is, Cervenak takes up artists and works that either have been understudied or are not typically considered in the same context. . . . [Black Gathering] rewards readers interested in Black women’s (literary and visual) art, questions of form, and Black abstraction.”

-- Evie Shockley ISLE

“Black Gathering’s utopianism bespeaks an investment, inherited from performance studies, in what artworks are as well as what they do. Cervenak approaches Black ecologies not from the perspective of animality but from that of property. . . . Art, for Cervenak, generates a commons of sorts: it holds space for Black life, unenclosed.”

-- Jean-Thomas Tremblay GLQ

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Introduction. Another Beginning Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
PART I. GATHERING'S ART
1. “FOR A WHILE AT LEAST” Toni Morrison and Nikki Wallschlaeger Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	23
2. THE ART OF THE MATTER Samiya Bashir and Gabrielle Ralambo-Rajerison Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	59
Part II. THE ART OF GATHERING
3. ARRANGEMENTS AGAINST THE SENTENCE Gayl Jones Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	97
4. “A PROJECT FROM OUTSIDE” Leonardo Drew Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	123
CONCLUSION Clementine Hunter Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	153
NOTES Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	165
REFERENCES Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	177
INDEX Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	189

Language: English
Publisher: Duke University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 208

eBook

Published: August 9, 2021
ISBN: 9781478021773