Sarah Cervenak

an excerpt:  What might it mean to regard the page as a “plane”? Might dwelling with the page in this way and as its own environment and set of aesthetic experimentations be a mode of abiding by the book’s “three dimensional[ity]”?

This writing is at once moved by a celebratory interest and by an ongoing rethinking of books’ ecoaesthetic potentialities in the context of Black women’s writings."

“High Under  the Pew:  A Critical Meditation on Joseph Winters’s Hope Draped in Black” thinks Joseph Winters’s text in relation to critical poetics, Black studies and Black feminist thought.  In particular, I trace how Winters’s philosophical engagement with the concept of "melancholic hope" in Black literary production extends these above-named intellectual traditions’ critiques of the post-Enlightenment subject.  More precisely, Winters dwelling with “melancholic hope” as it manifests in Black aesthetic and political thought attends to modes of being inassimilable to racist, heteronormative, ableist and capitalist narratives of space-time and progress. (not sure I can post here but happy to share with anyone who's interested.

How do the visualities of Black Lives Matter
protests relate to—maybe amble into—the
nonperformative textures of mourning?2
What happens to the question of nonperformativity
in the face of the protest photo’s
presumptive publicity? I ask these questions in
relation to a 2014 New York Daily News photo
of the late Erica Garner.

"I wonder how such attention to the airy entanglements, water's after/life elucidates something about this question around the intersections of blackness, reproduction, and performance and does so by poeticizing an answer that only the sky can decipher."

In this white paper, the authors describe and elaborate the significance of their co-convened series of events that spanned the 2016–2017 academic year. Carter and Cervenak recap the multiple meditations (including providing summaries of talks of invited speakers for the series) carried out throughout the year on what "the black outdoors" means for social thought, even as they also theorize and question that very concept. This they do by thinking through the intersections of race, sexuality, ecology, self-possession, and the un/settled grounds of legitimate American personhood and citizenship. At the heart of this inquiry, they argue, is a commitment to interrogate the formative roles played by settler colonialism and racial slavery in the figuration of an American idealized subject and to challenge resistant modalities that hold on to self-possession and propertied personhood even as they might contest its racial and sexual premises. Moreover, they elaborate on how "outdoors," as a concept, wasn’t "merely" an idea; it was a mode of life. What they learned in study was its (study’s) ongoingness; not only do their projects deeply and profoundly speak to and overlap with each other but, as well, always already aspire to another kind of environmental ethos, another ecology, an extended practice and play of study, of which this series was just one expression.

From the " founding " of the United States to our present, citizenship as the consolidation of white self-possession has presumed and required the ecological estrangements of racialized, sexualized, and nuerodiverse people. " Outdoors " was and is a scene of such brutality, with anti-blackness and mass dispossession advanced in the interest of whiteness' possessive particularity in the building of a self-owning, earth-owning world. A fear of the outdoors is always a fear of blackness, a fear of what evades what J. Jack Halberstam has called " housing and positioning. " We seek texts querying the " black outdoors " as a scene of racial, sexual, economic, and ecological violence. At the same time, we invite writings that hold outdoors open to its own outness, its own atmospheric vastness, which includes land and environment, but also what registers as unseen, forms of social life and feeling exceeding the protocols of rational, theo-secular, and civic administration. We envision books, poetry and prose, on and of this fugitive edge. With his Arkestra band, Sun Ra might say that our series will be a clearing for projects that study what is otherwordly or 'out of this world'; poet Ed Roberson might say our series creates a space for studies committed to 'seeing the earth before the end of the world'; Denise Ferreira da Silva might say that our series invites books committed to a 'poethics' at the end of time. As such, we invite a range of approaches to blackness and out(doors)ness, to what black outdoors as potential and possibility, could mean. Indeed, we welcome a range of genres of inquiry: academic prose, creative or experimental writing, poetry, etc. More still, we welcome engagements with the concept and experience of the black outdoors that emerge out of and in conversation with black geographic and environmental studies, queer theory, quantum physics, sound studies, feminist theory, critical ecology, performance studies, urban studies, disability studies, molecular biology, poetry and poetics, literary theory, and religious and theological studies. In short, " black outdoors " is the sign of an open poetics; it is experimental and invites experiment. In its concern with both scholarly and creative modes of social and ecological engagement with " scenes of subjection, " Black Outdoors: Innovations in the Poetics of Study invites writings that trouble the distinction between fields, between the scholarly and the creative, in the name of a poetics of unsettlement and the unhomely, of imagination and possibility. For more information and general queries, please contact series editors, Sarah Jane Cervenak, sjcerven@uncg.edu and J. Kameron Carter, j.carter@duke.edu.