In Black Gathering Sarah Jane Cervenak engages with Black artists and writers who create alternative spaces for Black people to gather free from interruption or regulation. Drawing together Black feminist theory, critical theories of ecology and ecoaesthetics, and Black aesthetics, Cervenak shows how novelists, poets, and visual artists such as Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison, Clementine Hunter, Samiya Bashir, and Leonardo Drew advance an ecological imagination that unsettles Western philosophical ideas of the earth as given to humans. In their aestheticization and conceptualization of gathering, these artists investigate the relationships among art, the environment, home, and forms of Black togetherness. Cervenak argues that by offering a formal and conceptual praxis of gathering, Black artists imagine liberation and alternative ways of being in the world that exist beyond those Enlightenment philosophies that presume Black people and earth as given to enclosure and ownership.

About the Author
Sarah Jane Cervenak is Associate Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and of African American and African Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. She is the author of Wandering: Philosophical Performances of Racial and Sexual Freedom, also published by Duke University Press.

Reviews
"Extending her rich study of philosophical praxis and the racial politics of wandering, Sarah Jane Cervenak explores daily practices and real-life social happenings as frames for navigating the discourses of death, subjection, and, most vitally, life. Surely this is a gathering; surely this is a beautiful work in Black aesthetics." -- Kevin Quashie, author of * Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being *
"Foregrounding fugitive existence in the reading of key literary texts and artworks, Black Gathering offers a powerful account of how Blackness (as it signals the without of modern representation) releases humans and nonhumans from their modern aesthetic enclosure (as subject and object of uncommitted contemplation) and juridic-economic misfortune (as subject and object of expropriation and extraction)." -- Denise Ferreira da Silva, author of * Toward a Global Idea of Race *
"[Black Gathering], laid out in a captivating manner, moves from engagement with the concept of an earthly home and expands into works which explore the cosmos as well as parallel worlds. . . . This book will be of interest to advanced scholars studying the theory of African American artistic contributions." -- Laura Christine Haynes * ARLIS/NA *
"One of the key strengths of the book is its own 'gathering': that is, Cervenak takes up artists and works that either have been understudied or are not typically considered in the same context. . . . [Black Gathering] rewards readers interested in Black women's (literary and visual) art, questions of form, and Black abstraction." -- Evie Shockley * ISLE *
"Black Gathering's utopianism bespeaks an investment, inherited from performance studies, in what artworks are as well as what they do. Cervenak approaches Black ecologies not from the perspective of animality but from that of property. . . . Art, for Cervenak, generates a commons of sorts: it holds space for Black life, unenclosed." -- Jean-Thomas Tremblay * GLQ *



Book Information
ISBN 9781478014478
Author Sarah Jane Cervenak
Format Paperback
Page Count 208
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 318g