Black Gathering: Art, Ecology, Ungiven Life

"In Black Gathering, Sarah Jane Cervenak engages post-1970s Black artists and writers who, through language, image, and form, create alternate environments for Black people and earth to come together without interruption or regulation. Drawing on Black feminist theory, critical theories of ecology and ecoaesthetics, and theories of Black aesthetics, Cervenak engages Black artistic enactments of ecology and ungiven life. She thinks particularly about how Black artists and writers, like Gayl Jones and Clementine Hunter, enact spaces of gathering for the besieged to come together without regulation. Moreover, she attends to the significance of Black artists' gatherings as praxis, as practice without the interruptions of imposed category or imposed relation"--
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 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.