Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being (Black Outdoors: Innovations in the Poetics of Study)

"Kevin Quashie analyzes texts by of Lucille Clifton, June Jordan, Toni Morrison, Evie Shockley, Gwendolyn Brooks, and others to argue for a black aliveness that is disarticulated from antiblackness and which provides the basis for the imagination and creation of a black world."-- Provided by publisher In Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being , Kevin Quashie imagines a Black world in which one encounters Black being as it is rather than only as it exists in the shadow of anti-Black violence. As such, he makes a case for Black aliveness even in the face of the persistence of death in Black life and Black study. Centrally, Quashie theorizes aliveness through the aesthetics of poetry, reading poetic inhabitance in Black feminist literary texts by Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Toni Morrison, and Evie Shockley, among others, showing how their philosophical and creative thinking constitutes worldmaking. This worldmaking conceptualizes Blackness as capacious, relational beyond the normative terms of recognitionBlackness as a condition of oneness. Reading for poetic aliveness, then, becomes a means of exploring Black being rather than nonbeing and animates the ethical question how to be. In this way, Quashie offers a Black feminist philosophy of being, which is nothing less than a philosophy of the becoming of the Black world. In Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being, Kevin Quashieimagines a Black world in which one encounters Black beingas it is rather than only as it exists in the shadow of anti-Blackviolence. As such, he makes a case for Black aliveness even in theface of the persistence of death in Black life and Black study.Centrally, Quashie theorizes aliveness through the aesthetics ofpoetry, reading poetic inhabitance in Black feminist literary textsby Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Toni Morrison, andEvie Shockley, among others, showing how their philosophical andcreative thinking constitutes worldmaking. This worldmakingconceptualizes Blackness as capacious, relational beyond thenormative terms of recognition-Blackness as a condition of oneness.Reading for poetic aliveness, then, becomes a means of exploringBlack being rather than nonbeing and animates the ethical question"how to be." In this way, Quashie offers a Black feministphilosophy of being, which is nothing less than a philosophy of thebecoming of the Black world "Black Aliveness, or a Poetics of Being considers aliveness through the aesthetic doings of poems and essays, through the "imagine a black world" imperative that radiates as the operating ethos of the made-text. In such imagining, the matter of black humanity does not have to be argued for; in this state of aesthetic existence, being and becoming can unfurl. One is alive, one is alive, and this aliveness alights an encounter with the unanswerable ethical query, "how to be." Black Aliveness, then, is a practice of reading as if one is in a black world, as if the reading one is a one, in the relational sense, in the philosophical sense of that pronoun, "one" being a word that allows the self to abstract itself in an instance of study"-- Provided by publisher