Description
Book SynopsisThis pathbreaking book offers stunning new insight into modern black literature, environmental humanities, and poetry and poetics.
Trade ReviewThe black optimism that animates Posmentier's writing is also a prominent feature of the poems, songs, and works of visual art that she takes up as her primary objects of concern. Yet there is also, alongside this optimism, the ever-present specter of the end of the world—one that operates, always, right alongside the countless new worlds that black art necessarily engenders—which demands our attention.
—
SyndicateSonya Posmentier's
Cultivation and Catastrophe feels urgent and contemporary even as its turn to black lyric asks readers to pause, sound out, and reflect on a long history of poetic engagement with ecological catastrophe, forced migration, and the afterlife of the plantation.
—Britt Rusert, University of Massachusetts Amherst,
SyndicateThere is much to admire in this wide-ranging and carefully researched study. In particular, its close attention to poetic form represents a valuable contribution to postcolonial ecocriticism, which has tended to focus more on narrative genres.
—
Review of English StudiesPosmentier's monograph is a much-needed contribution to both the new lyric studies and ecopoetics, two fields that, until recently, have focused more often than not on the writings and methods of white European and American poets and critics.
—
Contemporary LiteratureThe capaciousness with which Posmentier approaches the lyric is generative, especially in light of environmental criticism's recent wave of poetry scholarship . . . groundbreaking.
—
Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and EnvironmentTable of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction
PART 1
1. Cultivating the New Negro
2. Cultivating the Nation
3. Cultivating the Caribbean
PART 2
4. Continuing Catastrophe
Collecting Catastrophe
5. Collecting Culture
6. Unnatural Catastrophe
Notes
Bibliography
Index
