Black Aliveness, or a Poetics of Being

by Kevin Quashie

Overview

In Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being, Kevin Quashie imagines a Black world in which one encounters Black being as it is rather than only as it exists in the shadow of anti-Black violence. As such, he makes a case for Black aliveness even in the face of the persistence of death in Black life and Black study. Centrally, Quashie theorizes aliveness through the aesthetics of poetry, reading poetic inhabitance in Black feminist literary texts by Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Toni Morrison, and Evie Shockley, among others, showing how their philosophical and creative thinking constitutes worldmaking. This worldmaking conceptualizes Blackness as capacious, relational beyond the normative terms of recognition—Blackness as a condition of oneness. Reading for poetic aliveness, then, becomes a means of exploring Black being rather than nonbeing and animates the ethical question “how to be.” In this way, Quashie offers a Black feminist philosophy of being, which is nothing less than a philosophy of the becoming of the Black world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478014010
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	02/26/2021
Series:	Black Outdoors: Innovations in the Poetics of Study
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Kevin Quashie is Professor of English at Brown Universityand the author of The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture and Black Women, Identity, and Cultural Theory: (Un)Becoming the Subject.

Table of Contents

Introduction. Aliveness  1
1. Aliveness and Relation  15
2. Aliveness and Oneness  31
3. Aliveness and Aesthetics  57
4. Aliveness in Two Essays  83
5. Aliveness and Ethics  107
Conclusion. Again, Aliveness  141
Acknowledgments  155
Notes  157
Bibliography  219
Permissions  227
Index  229

Editorial Reviews

"Kevin Quashie's book provides a blueprint for alternative methods of reading and studying Black life, Black worldmaking, and Black relationality."

E3W Review of Books - Daisy Guzman

"This deeply poetic, rich book may be paradigm shifting. Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers."

Choice - J. A. Kegley

"One of the most significant contributions of the book as a whole is the quiet but insistent contention that poetry and poetics can do the work of social analysis. It is here, in Quashie’s attention to aesthetic choices and form, that we appreciate the value of Black Aliveness. . . . Quashie has written a field-shifting book that centers aesthetic paths to life in place of restraint in its treatment of Black being."

Genre - Gershun Avilez

"Quashie’s Black Aliveness is not a blueprint or a definitive answer to his opening question. Rather, the book is more like a gesture and an invitation; it offers a path for studying Black life and world-making through aesthetics. Throughout, Quashie’s prose emulates the beauty, splendor, and energy of the writings that constitute the matrix for his reflections. The reader will appreciate how the author frequently pauses to consider the grandeur of an essay or the rhythm of a poem. Students of Black literature and aesthetics should also praise Quashie’s practice of sitting with Black texts as primary sources for critical thought and ethics."
 

Joseph Wintersn Literary History

"I found great relief in Quashie's formulation of the concept of 'oneness,' which he insists is 'not akin to individualism.'… Quashie's book has shifted decades of denial, distancing, and suppression for me, not by rescuing the I, but by giving me one, the becoming, the relational.… In dealing with my ontological anxieties, I have dreamed of dissolution, a release into the elements of the universe of which we are all made. But even if we mingle with the stars we are still left with particles and forms of relation between these particles. What an aha! moment for me, reading Quashie…. How freeing and wonderful. To relate, to mingle, is not a dissolve, but a proliferation."

Critical Inquiry - Jayna Brown

"Black Aliveness is an important intervention in a conversation that has come to dominate black studies in recent years, under a variety of different names: the question of the human, black ontology, the(im)possibility of black subjectivity, and afropessimism. . . . Quashie's book offers a loving response to and reorientation of a field that has come to read blackness as synonymous with death, and antiblackness as constitutive of black life."--Jennifer C. Nash "Cultural Critique" (9/1/2022 12:00:00 AM)

"Quashie's Black Aliveness is not a blueprint or a definitive answer to his opening question. Rather, the book is more like a gesture and an invitation; it offers a path for studying Black life and world-making through aesthetics. Throughout, Quashie's prose emulates the beauty, splendor, and energy of the writings that constitute the matrix for his reflections. The reader will appreciate how the author frequently pauses to consider the grandeur of an essay or the rhythm of a poem. Students of Black literature and aesthetics should also praise Quashie's practice of sitting with Black texts as primary sources for critical thought and ethics."
--Joseph Winters "American Literary History" (9/1/2022 12:00:00 AM)

"One of the most significant contributions of the book as a whole is the quiet but insistent contention that poetry and poetics can do the work of social analysis. It is here, in Quashie's attention to aesthetic choices and form, that we appreciate the value of Black Aliveness. . . . Quashie has written a field-shifting book that centers aesthetic paths to life in place of restraint in its treatment of Black being."--Gershun Avilez "Genre" (4/13/2022 12:00:00 AM)

"Kevin Quashie's book provides a blueprint for alternative methods of reading and studying Black life, Black worldmaking, and Black relationality."--Daisy Guzman "E3W Review of Books" (4/7/2022 12:00:00 AM)

"Quashie's efforts are triumphant. . . . This work and its tender attention to that which constitutes humanity within these texts of aliveness would retain its magic regardless of the world, 'the episteme, ' in which one finds it."--Erin Tatz "Theory & Event" (4/6/2022 12:00:00 AM)

"This deeply poetic, rich book may be paradigm shifting. Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers."--J. A. Kegley "Choice" (2/1/2022 12:00:00 AM)

"I found great relief in Quashie's formulation of the concept of 'oneness, ' which he insists is 'not akin to individualism.'... Quashie's book has shifted decades of denial, distancing, and suppression for me, not by rescuing the I, but by giving me one, the becoming, the relational.... In dealing with my ontological anxieties, I have dreamed of dissolution, a release into the elements of the universe of which we are all made. But even if we mingle with the stars we are still left with particles and forms of relation between these particles. What an aha! moment for me, reading Quashie.... How freeing and wonderful. To relate, to mingle, is not a dissolve, but a proliferation."--Jayna Brown "Critical Inquiry" (4/15/2021 12:00:00 AM)

"Decentering the focus on 'social death' in current black studies, Black Aliveness is the first book to push us to the next step when we start with the feeling of aliveness rather than with black death as a way of understanding black life. There is magical thinking and writing in this paradigm-shifting book."--Margo Natalie Crawford, author of "Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics"

"Black studies is a spiritual discipline, one devoted to that dispersed and disseminated gathering of a nonexclusionary black world. Kevin Quashie has helped me think about this and has given me intellectual and theoretical tools and language for this. Black Aliveness is one of the most intellectually stimulating, illuminating, and spiritually moving books I've read in a very long time. Its impact will be immediate."--J. Kameron Carter, author of "Race: A Theological Account"

From the Publisher

"Quashie's efforts are triumphant. . . . This work and its tender attention to that which constitutes humanity within these texts of aliveness would retain its magic regardless of the world, 'the episteme,' in which one finds it."

Theory & Event - Erin Tatz

Decentering the focus on ‘social death’ in current black studies, Black Aliveness is the first book to push us to the next step when we start with the feeling of aliveness rather than with black death as a way of understanding black life. There is magical thinking and writing in this paradigm-shifting book.

Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics - Margo Natalie Crawford

Black studies is a spiritual discipline, one devoted to that dispersed and disseminated gathering of a nonexclusionary black world. Kevin Quashie has helped me think about this and has given me intellectual and theoretical tools and language for this. Black Aliveness is one of the most intellectually stimulating, illuminating, and spiritually moving books I’ve read in a very long time. Its impact will be immediate.

Race: A Theological Account - J. Kameron Carter

"Black Aliveness is an important intervention in a conversation that has come to dominate black studies in recent years, under a variety of different names: the question of the human, black ontology, the(im)possibility of black subjectivity, and afropessimism. . . . Quashie’s book offers a loving response to and reorientation of a field that has come to read blackness as synonymous with death, and antiblackness as constitutive of black life."

Cultural Critique - Jennifer C. Nash

"Quashie’s Black Aliveness is not a blueprint or a definitive answer to his opening question. Rather, the book is more like a gesture and an invitation; it offers a path for studying Black life and world-making through aesthetics. Throughout, Quashie’s prose emulates the beauty, splendor, and energy of the writings that constitute the matrix for his reflections. The reader will appreciate how the author frequently pauses to consider the grandeur of an essay or the rhythm of a poem. Students of Black literature and aesthetics should also praise Quashie’s practice of sitting with Black texts as primary sources for critical thought and ethics."
 

American Literary History - Joseph Winters