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.

Jonathan Howard is Assistant Professor of African American Studies and English at Yale University.

Prologue. The Blueness of Blackness  xi
Introduction. The Deep  1
1. Deep Humanities  31
2. Deep Study  75
3. Deep Voice  117
4. Deep Imagination  139
5. Deep Life  167
6. Deep Vision  195
Epilogue. Ankle Deep  259
Acknowledgments. Deep Gratitude  265
Notes  269
Bibliography  299
Index  309