In The Lonely Letters, A tells Moth: "Writing about and thinking with joy is what sustains me, daily. It nourishes me. I do not write about joy primarily because I always have it. I write about joy, Black joy, because I want to generate it, I want it to emerge, I want to participate in its constant unfolding." But alongside joy, A admits to Moth, come loneliness, exclusion, and unfulfilled desire. The Lonely Letters is an epistolary blackqueer critique of the normative world in which Ashon T. Crawley-writing as A-meditates on the interrelation of blackqueer life, sounds of the Black church, theology, mysticism, and love. Throughout his letters, A explores blackness and queerness in the musical and embodied experience of Blackpentecostal spaces and the potential for platonic and erotic connection in a world that conspires against blackqueer life. Both a rigorous study and a performance, The Lonely Letters gestures toward understanding the capacity for what we study to work on us, to transform us, and to change how we inhabit the world.

About the Author
Ashon T. Crawley is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and African American Studies at the University of Virginia and author of Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility.

Reviews
"Ashon T. Crawley pushes his readers to contemplate the intimacy of living the life of the mind as a spiritual, enfleshed, and intellectual matter. Rejecting the intellect/emotion division through a rendering of intimacy and desire, The Lonely Letters stands as the achievement of aspirations long discussed but largely elusive in both feminist and queer criticism. A stunning and innovative work." -- Imani Perry, author of * Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation *
"The Lonely Letters is a joyful mourning, a celebratory treatise, a rigorous performance, and an analysis of race and philosophy, aesthetics and blackness, and much more. I could not put it down and at points found myself laughing and in tears, all the while learning. Truly pathbreaking, it is an astounding, innovative, and deeply affecting work." -- Nicole R. Fleetwood, author of * On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination *
"The Lonely Letters, from A to Moth, from Crawley to us, is ultimately an illumination of a way to Baby Suggs' clearing in Beloved, the site of blackqueer care, the site of grace-an invitation to 'refuse the prison of "I" and choose the open spaces of "we."'" -- Yumi Pak * American Studies *
"I admire Crawley's writing about queerness and sociality profoundly. I revere his embrace of the epistolary, of the way he makes academic writing feel pulsing and alive, enacted with breath and desire and shouting and song. . . . [E]ach letter is a flexing, embodied interweaving of queer theory, Black studies, music, eros, intellect, art, friendship, religion, body, breath. It is critical and creative all at once." -- Ayden Leroux * Full Stop *
"Crawley opens the world of critical theory (a discipline not known best for being welcoming to all minds and approaches) to those readers who might not have a background in it."
-- Leora Fridman * Full Stop *
"The Lonely Letters, in thinking through and with Black life, challenges the reader to (re)imagine religion, mysticism, epistemology, performance, and the possibility of life together otherwise.... [It] bears the potential to push religious studies scholarship beyond what was presumed possible." -- Christopher Hunt * Journal of Africana Religions *
"The Lonely Letters arrives as a wonderful surprise: it invites us to sit with vulnerability, and to ask what vulnerability might offer our world-imagining practices." -- Keguro Macharia * GLQ *
"You can't review [The Lonely Letters]. Because you haven't just read a book. You've had an encounter. A beautiful, blackqueer, encounter." -- Biko Gray * Reading Religion *



Book Information
ISBN 9781478008248
Author Ashon T. Crawley
Format Paperback
Page Count 280
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 431g