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

dc.contributor.advisor	Mackey, Nathaniel
dc.contributor.author	Howard, Jonathan
dc.date.accessioned	2017-05-16T17:28:37Z
dc.date.available	2019-04-26T08:17:07Z
dc.date.issued	2017
dc.department	English
dc.description.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.
dc.identifier.uri	https://hdl.handle.net/10161/14514
dc.subject	African American studies
dc.subject	Environmental studies
dc.subject	Black studies
dc.subject	August Wilson
dc.subject	black aesthetics
dc.subject	Black studies
dc.subject	Ecocriticism
dc.subject	Middle Passage
dc.subject	oceanic studies
dc.title	"Inhabitants of the Deep": Water and the Material Imagination of Blackness
dc.type	Dissertation
duke.embargo.months	23

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