Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being

Speaking our imaginings into existence: Poetry as a contestation of Black erasure in academia.

“…Our process of dreaming, writing, and dialogue, on and about the extant poems, therefore, did more than narrate oppression (Kelley, 2002); instead, the process was generative in that it transported us to an elsewhere, allowing for an equally sober and enlivened examination of our experiences and the conditions of some Black scholars while enabling us to imagine what could be. We echo Quashie (2021) articulation of an aesthetic of Black aliveness through poetry,What I want is the freeness of a black world where blackness can be of being, where there is no argument to be made, where there is no speaking to or against an audience because we are all the audience there is…and as such, the text’s work can manifest an invitation to study and to becoming for the black one. (p. 10)…”

Black Geographies and Black Ecologies as Insurgent Ecocriticism

“…Much of this is signaled by Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Woods' ( 2007) genre-defi ning volume entitled Black Geographies and the Politics of Place. By critically engaging with the historical trajectories and ongoing dynamics of the time-space of race and the racial production of space, Black geographies scholars have insisted on taking Black poetics of space seriously (Edwards 2003;Glissant 1990;Hunter and Robinson 2018;Quashie 2021). Th ese poetics, they show, constitute a canon of Black spatial history, epistemologies, and place (re)productions across the Black Atlantic.…”

Unruly edges: Toddler literacies of the Capitalocene

“…Tsing's advice is echoed by others who have argued for the need to reorientate how we relate to the category of 'human' and the world in which we are inextricably entangled (Haraway, 2016;Jackson, 2020;Quashie, 2021). Alaimo (2016: 169) critiques discourses of sustainability as relying on notions of the natural world as 'storehouses of resources to be consumed', unpinned by assumptions that human innovation will identify ways to keep the storehouse 'topped up', enabling daily life to continue as normal.…”

“…Thiel and Dernikos (2020) draw on Crawley's work to emphasise the importance of movement, breath and the body. Quashie (2021) similarly theorises alternative forms of world making via his notion of Black Aliveness, foregrounding 'capacities of knowing' (Lorde, cited in Quashie, 2021: 17) located in the body and in sensation. Quashie's (2021) engagement with the work of Martin Buber offers an explicitly anti-racist alternative to the subject/object divisions promulgated in a 'pedagogy of order words' (MacLure, 2016) that seem to continuously reproduce the mastery narrative that Singh (2018) critiques.…”

“…Quashie (2021) similarly theorises alternative forms of world making via his notion of Black Aliveness, foregrounding 'capacities of knowing' (Lorde, cited in Quashie, 2021: 17) located in the body and in sensation. Quashie's (2021) engagement with the work of Martin Buber offers an explicitly anti-racist alternative to the subject/object divisions promulgated in a 'pedagogy of order words' (MacLure, 2016) that seem to continuously reproduce the mastery narrative that Singh (2018) critiques. Quashie draws on Buber to describe different modes of orientating to the world, including an 'I-You' orientation, in which the emphasis is not on understanding or knowing (e.g.…”