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In Black Environmentalisms, editors Cajetan Iheka and Jonathan Howard reengage African and African Diaspora studies around the urgent question of environmental crisis. Probing the continuities between global antiblackness and the endangerment of planetary life, contributors argue that black life and expressive culture constitute unique sources of ecological thought and practice. Across a wide variety of black geographies and thought, their essays bear witness to not only black ecological precarity but also the cultivational practices that people of African descent have summoned over time to combat their exploitation and enact a living relationship to the earth. As they show, the rich practices of black communities emerge from a radical alignment with, rather than paternalistic conservation of, the nonhuman natural world. Reimagining environmentalism beyond the limits of western humanism, Black Environmentalisms charts new pathways of environmental criticism by foregrounding the ecological worldmaking practices of black people across the planet.

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.