Book Talk with Jonathan Howard: Inhabitants of the Deep
We are so excited to host Dr. Jonathan Howard for a talk about his new release, Inhabitants of the Deep: The Blueness of Blackness. Jonathan will be in conversation with Professor Maurice Wallace. Join us for what promises to be a wonderful event!
More about the book:
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.
More about Jonathan:
Dr. Jonathan Howard is an Assistant Professor of English and Black Studies at Yale University. His research and teaching broadly interrogate western ideas about race and nature, weighing their entangled contribution to the formation of a modern world in ecological peril while also exploring black expressive culture as an alternative site of ecological thought and practice.
Dr. Howard is an African American literary scholar whose research places the literary and intellectual traditions of the African Diaspora in conversation with the environmental humanities. He is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including generous support from the Fulbright Program, The Institute for Citizens and Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson Foundation), The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Harrington Fellows Program. His articles can be found or are forthcoming at Callaloo, Souls, and Atlantic Studies. His current book project, Inhabitants of the Deep: The Blueness of Blackness, illuminates the abiding relationship between blackness and the oceanic by undertaking a black ecocritical study of the trope of water in African Diaspora literature. It argues that the blackness which dawned in the oceanic encounter of Middle Passage constitutes not social death, but ecological life. This black, which was first blue, indexes a global species event, whose expressive legacy harbors an ecological recalibration of human being on a blue planet.
Dr. Howard teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in African American literary studies, black studies, and the environmental humanities. His teaching surveys the literary, expressive, and intellectual traditions of the African Diaspora as a crucial reserve of environmental and ecological thought. Above all, and in deep collaboration with his students, his courses aim to facilitate the phenomenon of “black study.” That is, to attend, again and again, in literature and more, to black death and life, to no smaller end than the end of the antiblack world and the celebration and magnification of black life on earth.
Dr. Howard earned an M.A. and PhD from Duke University and a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania.
More about Maurice:
Maurice Wallace Professor of English at Rutgers University, New-Brunswick. He is the author ofConstructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men’s Literature and Culture, 1775-1995 (which earned him an MLA William Scarborough Prize) and King’s Vibrato: Blackness, Modernism and the Sonic Life of Martin Luther King Jr., both published by Duke Univ. Press. He is co-editor with Shawn Michelle Smith ofPictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity and has written a short biography of Langston Hughes for junior high and high school students, published by Marshal-Cavendish Publishers. He has written a number of scholarly articles ranging topically from the nineteenth-century religious roots of African American literature to early and modern photography, race and disability, and Black oratory. He is the recent recipient of the Rutgers Presidential Outstanding Faculty Scholar Award.
Maurice is presently at work on a monograph he callsBlack Trees, a meditation on race, ecology, and tree life in the US.