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"Inhabitants of the Deep": Water and the Material Imagination of Blackness

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Date
2017
Author
Howard, Jonathan
Advisor
Mackey, Nathaniel
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Abstract

This dissertation undertakes a black ecocritical study of the trope of water in African Diasporic Literature. Over the course of three chapters treating fiction, drama, and photography, in a study both multi-generic and interdisciplinary in scope, I illuminate the ways in which black literature recursively figures the problem of being black in terms of a recurring crisis of having no ground that originates with and is haunted by the waters of Middle Passage. However, beyond its traumatic associations with the slave trade, I also argue, following the aesthetic philosophy of Gaston Bachelard, that water provides the feature element of what I call the "material imagination of blackness." That is, a poetic and ethical imagination informed by the physiopoetic properties of water that inspires both black literary creation and enactments of black social life.

Type
Dissertation
Department
English
Subject
African American studies
Environmental studies
Black studies
August Wilson
black aesthetics
black studies
ecocriticism
Middle Passage
oceanic studies
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https://hdl.handle.net/10161/14514
Citation
Howard, Jonathan (2017). "Inhabitants of the Deep": Water and the Material Imagination of Blackness. Dissertation, Duke University. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/14514.
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