Black Gathering: Art, Ecology, Ungiven Life

Black Outdoors: Innovations in the Poetics of Study

by Sarah Jane Cervenak

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.

Genres: Art

208 pages, Hardcover

Published September 24, 2021

About the author

Sarah Jane Cervenak is an associate professor, jointly appointed in the Women’s and Gender Studies and African American and African Diaspora Studies programs at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Her book, Black Gathering: Art, Ecology, Ungiven Life queries the Black radical, feminist potential of gathering in post-1970s Black literary and visual arts. She is also the author of Wandering: Philosophical Performances of Racial and Sexual Freedom (Duke University Press, September 2014). She is also co-editor, with J. Kameron Carter, of the Duke University Press book series, Black Outdoors: Innovations in the Poetics of Study.

Reviews

[Cana McGhee · Rating 3 out of 5]

im still not totally sure what to make of this book. on the one hand it’s super clear about its focus on how language helps create alternative kinds of community, but on the other hand that feels too obvious and i feel like im missing something? ch 2 about the intergalactic poetry was cool to experience, and ch 3 about gayl jones’s short stories and the use of “cripped language” felt closest to what cervenak was trying to argue. 🤷‍♀️

[Melvin]

Good analyses of Black artworks (novel, poems, sculptures, paintings). I was most interested in the first chapter as my work is in animal studies. I can see how this book represents an example of how Black people are making new worlds.