Inhabitants of the Deep

About

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 on which 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 as the black ecological life hailed by a blue planet.

Dr. Howard is an Assistant Professor of English and Black Studies at Yale University. His research focuses on African American literary studies, intellectual traditions of the African Diaspora, and the environmental humanities. Broadly investigating how western ideas of race and nature contribute to our current ecological crisis, his research centers Black expressive culture as a vital site of ecological thought and practice. He is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including generous support from the Fulbright Program, The Institute for Citizens and Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson Foundation), The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Harrington Fellows Program.

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