"Inhabitants of the Deep": Water and the Material Imagination of Blackness

<p>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.</p>

Author dc:creator

• Howard, Jonathan

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Mackey, Nathaniel

• African American studies
• Environmental studies
• Black studies
• August Wilson
• black aesthetics
• ecocriticism
• Middle Passage
• oceanic studies

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/10161/14514

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dukespace.lib.duke.edu:10161/14514