Inhabitants of the Deep

“Jonathan Howard’s Inhabitants of the Deep is a brilliant, rigorous, and sophisticated account of Black life. At the crossroads of ecopoetics, social history, and cultural criticism, Howard explores how the waterways of history provide fertile ground for understanding Black life not as social death but rather as deep living. While offering new critical terms and deeply engaging with contemporary critical theory, this book is a wholly unique yet also deeply grounded intellectual intervention.” - Imani Perry, author of Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People

“Where to begin with blackness? Why not the deep, the grave indeterminate poetic of water? So it is that Howard argues genesis and origin(s), turning to aquatic sightings and citings, reckoning with trace and longing and errancy and errantry. In doing this, he animates literariness through the ecologies water makes possible. Here,deep modifies study, voice, imagination; here, in this book, are some fugitive provocations—what a ride it is to think with them.” - Kevin Quashie, author of Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being

"Inhabitants of the Deep is rich in luminous and . . . deep thought. . . . [It] deserves widely to be read." - William Brown, Ethnic and Racial Studies