A01=Jonathan Howard
afropessimism
August Wilson
Author_Jonathan Howard
black ecological life
black ecologies
black studies
blackness
blue humanities
Burr Oak Cemetery
Category=DSB
Category=JBSL1
Century Cycle
Du Bois
ecocriticism
ecological life
Emmett Till
environmental humanities
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Equiano
Frederick Douglass
Gaston Bachelard
Gem of the Ocean
Henry Bibb
Louis Armstrong
Mamie Till-Mobley
material imagination
Middle Passage
Moby-Dick
National Museum of African American History and Culture
oceanic studies
Olaudah Equiano
Otis Redding
Paule Marshall
Pip
plot
Ralph Ellison
slave narrative
social death
sound studies
stand your ground
submersion narrative
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano
transatlantic slave trade
visuality
whiteness
Product details
- ISBN 9781478029281
- Weight: 572g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 11 Nov 2025
- Publisher: Duke University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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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.
Jonathan Howard is Assistant Professor of African American Studies and English at Yale University.
