Book Salon: Jonathan Howard with M. NourbeSe Philip

Yale's Black Studies, English, Environmental Humanities, Black Feminist Collective, and RITM welcome you to a book salon for Inhabitants of the Deep: The Blueness of Blackness (Duke University Press, 2025) by Jonathan Howard. The event will feature a special presentation from poet M. NourbeSe Philip, a panel of respondents, and a reading from Professor Howard, with a reception to follow. No registration required.

In Inhabitants of the Deep, Jonathan Howard undertakes a black ecocritical study of the deep in African American literature. Howard contends that the deep—a geographic formation that includes oceans, rivers, lakes, and the notion of depth itself—provides the diffuse subtext of black literary and expressive culture. He draws on texts by authors ranging from Olaudah Equiano and Herman Melville to Otis Redding and August Wilson to present a vision of blackness as an ongoing inhabitation of the deep that originates with and persists beyond Middle Passage. From captive Africans’ first tentative encounter with the landless realm of the Atlantic to the ground on which black peoples still struggle to stand, the deep is what blackness has known throughout the changing same of black life and death. Yet this radical exclusion from the superficial Western world, Howard contends, is more fully apprehended not as the social death hailed by the slave ship but as the black ecological life hailed by a blue planet.

Dr. Jonathan Howard is an Assistant Professor of English and Black Studies at Yale University. His research and teaching broadly interrogate western ideas about race and nature, weighing their entangled contribution to the formation of a modern world in ecological peril while also exploring black expressive culture as an alternative site of ecological thought and practice.

M. NOURBESE PHILIP is a poet and writer and lawyer who lives in the City of Toronto. She was born in Tobago and now lives in Canada.