Books in the Black Outdoors: Innovations in the Poetics of Study series

Pointing out that presumptions of solidarity, antagonism, or incommensurability between Black and Native communities are insufficient to understand the relationships between both groups, this volume's scholars, artist, and activists investigate the complex relationships between settler colonialism and anti-Blackness to explore the political possibilities that emerge from such inquiries.

Pointing out that presumptions of solidarity, antagonism, or incommensurability between Black and Native communities are insufficient to understand the relationships between both groups, this volume's scholars, artist, and activists investigate the complex relationships between settler colonialism and anti-Blackness to explore the political possibilities that emerge from such inquiries.

Examining black performance practices that critique Western humanism, R. A. Judy offers an extended meditation on questions of blackness, the human, epistemology, and the historical ways in which the black being is understood.

La Marr Jurelle Bruce ponders the presence of "madness" in black literature, music, and performance since the early twentieth century, showing how artist ranging from Kendrick Lamar and Lauryn Hill to Nina Simone and Dave Chappelle activate madness as content, form, aesthetic, strategy, philosophy, and energy in an enduring black radical tradition.

Maya Stovall uses her Liquor Store Theatre conceptual art project-in which she danced near her Detroit neighborhood's liquor stores as a way to start conversations with her neighbors-as a point of departure for understanding everyday life in Detroit and the possibilities for ethnographic research, art, and knowledge creation.

The contributors to Beyond Man reckon with the colonial and racial implications of the philosophy of religion's history by staging a conversation between it and Black, Indigenous, and decolonial studies.

Kevin Quashie analyzes texts by of Lucille Clifton, June Jordan, Toni Morrison, Evie Shockley, Gwendolyn Brooks, and others to argue for a black aliveness that is disarticulated from antiblackness and which provides the basis for the imagination and creation of a black world.

In Toward Camden, Mercy Romero writes a complex and vibrant story about the largely African American and Puerto Rican Cramer Hill neighborhood in New Jersey where she grew up.

Sarah Jane Cervenak traces how Black artists and writers who create alternative spaces for Black people to gather free from those Enlightenment philosophies that presume Black people and land as given to enclosure and ownership.

In three long-form poems and a lyrical essay, fahima ife speculates on the afterlives of Black fugitivity, unsettling the historic knowledge of it while moving inside the ongoing afterlives of those people who disappeared themselves into rural spaces beyond the reach of slavery.

Rachel Zolf activates the last three lines of a poem by Jewish Nazi Holocaust survivor Paul Celan-"No one / bears witness for the / witness"-to theorize the poetics and im/possibility of witnessing.

Marquis Bey offers a meditation on blackness and gender nonnormativity in ways that recalibrate traditional understandings of each, conceiving of black trans feminism as a politics grounded in fugitivity and the subversion of power.