ABOUT THIS BOOK

In Black Gathering Sarah Jane Cervenak engages with Black artists and writers who create alternative spaces for Black people to gather free from interruption or regulation. Drawing together Black feminist theory, critical theories of ecology and ecoaesthetics, and Black aesthetics, Cervenak shows how novelists, poets, and visual artists such as Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison, Clementine Hunter, Samiya Bashir, and Leonardo Drew advance an ecological imagination that unsettles Western philosophical ideas of the earth as given to humans. In their aestheticization and conceptualization of gathering, these artists investigate the relationships among art, the environment, home, and forms of Black togetherness. Cervenak argues that by offering a formal and conceptual praxis of gathering, Black artists imagine liberation and alternative ways of being in the world that exist beyond those Enlightenment philosophies that presume Black people and earth as given to enclosure and ownership.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

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

"Across all four chapters, Cervenak’s writing weaves in and out of the poetic and the academic, producing a lyrically rigorous and profoundly intricate text. While at times challenging to parse for exactly these reasons, Black Gathering demands of its readers slow reading and an even slower meditative engagement which might prove difficult yet ultimately rewarding for readers unfamiliar with the current scholarship of Black ecologies, Black geographies, ecopoetics, and anti-colonial philosophy. Moreover, her attunement to the potential of gathering and togetherness to enact new modes of being in the world will be valuable to students, scholars, and artists alike who are in search of an expansive theorization on what an ecology or environment could be."
-- Kelann Currie-Williams Lateral

"As a scholar deeply committed to the liberative potential of Black artists, writers, and scholars, Cervenak’s Black Gathering is a reminder that societal structures of oppression are not all encompassing, and there are ways of being otherwise that have always eluded capture."
-- Gervais Marsh Journal of Visual Culture

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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