We are regularly faced with news accounts detailing violence against Black people. It is almost as if to talk about Black lived experience necessitates talking about the threat of death. The serial nature of such violence has led to a reckoning with the social significance and seeming inevitability of Black death within critical culture. Kevin Quashie's innovative and insightful book Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being responds to and moves away from the (over)emphasis on death in representations and considerations of Black life. Quashie takes seriously the threat of death for those embodied as Black, but he resists allowing violence and death to define all that Blackness signifies. He turns to the world of expressive culture (primarily individual poems and essays) to show how artists have imagined what he calls “black worlds.” He uses this term to describe aesthetic imaginaries that situate texts as spaces of encounter that allow...
Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being
GerShun Avilez is professor of English and director of graduate studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is a cultural studies scholar who specializes in contemporary African American and Black diasporic literatures and visual cultures. Much of his scholarship explores how questions of gender and sexuality inform artistic production. He has published two books: Radical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism (2016) and Black Queer Freedom: Spaces of Injury and Paths of Desire (2020). He has written essays on a range of historical and cultural subjects, including the Cold War, segregation narratives, early African American writing, race and terror, social death, queer life, experimental poetry, Black women's writing, the Harlem Renaissance, Black Power gender politics, and the Black Arts Movement.
Gershun Avilez; Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being. Genre 1 April 2022; 55 (1): 55–59. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00166928-9720920
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