"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 | ||
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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