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Inhabitants of the Deep: The Blueness of Blackness
In Inhabitants of the Deep, Jonathan Howard undertakes a black ecocritical study of the deep in African American literature. Howard contends that the deep—a geographic formation that includes oceans, rivers, lakes, and the notion of depth itself—provides the diffuse subtext of black literary and expressive culture. He draws on texts by authors ranging from Olaudah Equiano and Herman Melville to Otis Redding and August Wilson to present a vision of blackness as an ongoing inhabitation of the deep that originates with and persists beyond Middle Passage. From captive Africans’ first tentative encounter with the landless realm of the Atlantic to the ground on which black peoples still struggle to stand, the deep is what blackness has known throughout the changing same of black life and death. Yet this radical exclusion from the superficial Western world, Howard contends, is more fully apprehended not as the social death hailed by the slave ship but as the black ecological life hailed by a blue planet.
352 pages, Hardcover
Published November 11, 2025
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About the author
Jonathan Howard
48 books4 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 12, 2026
xi ‘In the beginning, black was blue.’
xx ‘Yet if, in this way, this book blues black, it also blackens blue [...] by privileging the black maritime experiences of middle passing Africans in the blue humanities’ effort to think the human inhabitant of our blue planet [...] Any environment or blue humanities that merely or uncritically appends a concern for the environment to western humanism fails to speak adequately to the experiences of these non-Human humans or apprehend a modern humanism threat that is not just anti-ecological but also antiblack [...] this book pursues an intercalation of the critiques of the Human arising out of both the environmental humanities and black studies. More specifically, it takes up the environmental or, even more precisely, blue humanity elaborated by the non-Human human, or the Black, in blackness’s primordial encounter with our blue planet.’
xxviii ‘What would it mean to think the dawning of blackness in Middle Passage as not reducible to the “social death” hailed by the salute of the slave ship? What if, instead, we think blackness as not just responding also, but first, to the hailing waves of the astonishing sea? “Hey, you there! Hey, earthling.” What if, as our original antiphony, blackness dawns in the ongoing response of black ecological life to the hail of a blue planet?’
89 ‘Absolutely unsocial, uninhabitable, and antagonistically opposed to Human life, blue is not the new black. Or even like black. Rather, blue is black, and black is blue. Together, and not in isolation, both bear the burden of representing non-Human difference, human and nonhuman alike, par excellence. Of furnishing the constitutive outside of the modern, Human, and antiblack/blue world.’
165 ‘The blueness of blackness, in other words, is not only a question of blackness’s interpellation as slaveness. It’s also, and first, a matter of consenting to inhabit the deep. We are hailed as much by the astonishment of the ocean as by the terror of the slave ship. From the very first, there is this fork in the road of black study yielding paths to optimism and pessimism. And while I don’t propose we do away with the fork, I do propose we recognize that there is one. Perhaps then we might find ourselves better equipped to eat our question.’
202 ‘But what if we just agree, with Fred Moten, that “our existence is unrecognizable, if we could only imagine it” [...] I want to try to imagine the unrecognizable life we live together on this blue planet, and I want to try this by trying to bear witness to the inhabitants of the deep’
263 ‘What would it mean for the “human being” to consent to inhabit the deep? A world where all life flourishes awaits our answer.’
xx ‘Yet if, in this way, this book blues black, it also blackens blue [...] by privileging the black maritime experiences of middle passing Africans in the blue humanities’ effort to think the human inhabitant of our blue planet [...] Any environment or blue humanities that merely or uncritically appends a concern for the environment to western humanism fails to speak adequately to the experiences of these non-Human humans or apprehend a modern humanism threat that is not just anti-ecological but also antiblack [...] this book pursues an intercalation of the critiques of the Human arising out of both the environmental humanities and black studies. More specifically, it takes up the environmental or, even more precisely, blue humanity elaborated by the non-Human human, or the Black, in blackness’s primordial encounter with our blue planet.’
xxviii ‘What would it mean to think the dawning of blackness in Middle Passage as not reducible to the “social death” hailed by the salute of the slave ship? What if, instead, we think blackness as not just responding also, but first, to the hailing waves of the astonishing sea? “Hey, you there! Hey, earthling.” What if, as our original antiphony, blackness dawns in the ongoing response of black ecological life to the hail of a blue planet?’
89 ‘Absolutely unsocial, uninhabitable, and antagonistically opposed to Human life, blue is not the new black. Or even like black. Rather, blue is black, and black is blue. Together, and not in isolation, both bear the burden of representing non-Human difference, human and nonhuman alike, par excellence. Of furnishing the constitutive outside of the modern, Human, and antiblack/blue world.’
165 ‘The blueness of blackness, in other words, is not only a question of blackness’s interpellation as slaveness. It’s also, and first, a matter of consenting to inhabit the deep. We are hailed as much by the astonishment of the ocean as by the terror of the slave ship. From the very first, there is this fork in the road of black study yielding paths to optimism and pessimism. And while I don’t propose we do away with the fork, I do propose we recognize that there is one. Perhaps then we might find ourselves better equipped to eat our question.’
202 ‘But what if we just agree, with Fred Moten, that “our existence is unrecognizable, if we could only imagine it” [...] I want to try to imagine the unrecognizable life we live together on this blue planet, and I want to try this by trying to bear witness to the inhabitants of the deep’
263 ‘What would it mean for the “human being” to consent to inhabit the deep? A world where all life flourishes awaits our answer.’
February 20, 2026
I was lucky to review this for publication. A really excellent intersectional work of criticism. Despite being an academic work, Howard really knows how to write a pretty sentence.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews