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.
This book title, Inhabitants of the Deep (The Blueness of Blackness), ISBN: 9781478032618, by Jonathan Howard, published by Duke University Press (November 11, 2025) is available in paperback. Our minimum order quantity is 25 copies. All standard bulk book orders ship FREE in the continental USA and delivered in 4-10 business days.
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