Search results for ""Author Joshua Bennett""

Winner of the William Sanders Scarborough PrizeA prizewinning poet argues that Blackness acts as the caesura between human and nonhuman, man and animal.Throughout US history, Black people have been configured as sociolegal nonpersons, a subgenre of the human. Being Property Once Myself delves into the literary imagination and ethical concerns that have emerged from this experience. Each chapter tracks a specific animal figure—the rat, the cock, the mule, the dog, and the shark—in the works of Black authors such as Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Jesmyn Ward, and Robert Hayden. The plantation, the wilderness, the kitchenette overrun with pests, the simultaneous valuation and sale of animals and enslaved people—all are sites made unforgettable by literature in which we find Black and animal life in fraught proximity.Joshua Bennett argues that animal figures are deployed in these texts to assert a theory of Black sociality and to combat dominant claims about the limits of personhood. Bennett also turns to the Black radical tradition to challenge the pervasiveness of anti-Blackness in discourses surrounding the environment and animals. Being Property Once Myself is an incisive work of literary criticism and a close reading of undertheorized notions of dehumanization and the Anthropocene.

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A “rich hybrid of memoir and history” (The New Yorker) of the literary art form that has transformed the cultural landscape, by one of its influential practitioners, an award-winning poet, professor, and slam champion “Bennett…transport[s] us back to the city blocks, bars, cafes and stages these artists traversed and inhabited…an instructive text for young poets, artists or creative entrepreneurs trying to find a way to carve out a space for themselves…Shines with a refreshing dynamism.” —The New York TimesIn 2009, when he was twenty years old, Joshua Bennett was invited to perform a spoken word poem for the Obamas, at the same White House Poetry Jam where Lin-Manuel Miranda declaimed the opening bars of a work-in-progress that would soon revolutionize American theater. That meeting is but one among many in the trajectory of Bennett's young life, as he rode the cresting wav

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From a 2021 Whiting Award and Guggenheim Fellow recipient, a 'rhapsodic, rigorous poetry collection, which pays homage to everyday Black experience in the US' (New Yorker) Selected as a book of the year by the Telegraph _______________________________ Owed is a book with celebration at its centre. Its primary concern is how we might mend the relationship between ourselves and the people, spaces, and objects we have been taught to think of as insignificant, as fundamentally unworthy of study, reflection, attention, or care. Spanning the spectrum of genre and form - from elegy and ode to origin myth--these poems elaborate an aesthetics of repair. What's more, they ask that we turn to the songs and sites of the historically denigrated so that we might uncover a new way of being in the world together, one wherein we can truthfully reckon with the brutality of the past and thus imagine the possibilities of our shared, unpredictable present, anew.

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Winner of the William Sanders Scarborough Prize“This trenchant work of literary criticism examines the complex ways…African American authors have written about animals. In Bennett’s analysis, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Jesmyn Ward, and others subvert the racist comparisons that have ‘been used against them as a tool of derision and denigration.’...An intense and illuminating reevaluation of black literature and Western thought.” —Ron Charles, Washington PostFor much of American history, Black people have been conceived and legally defined as nonpersons, a subgenre of the human. In Being Property Once Myself, prize-winning poet Joshua Bennett shows that Blackness has long acted as the caesura between human and nonhuman and delves into the literary imagination and ethical concerns that have emerged from this experience. Each chapter tracks a specific animal—the rat, the cock, the mule, the dog, the shark—in the works of Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Jesmyn Ward, and Robert Hayden. The plantation, the wilderness, the kitchenette overrun with pests, the valuation and sale of animals and enslaved people—all place Black and animal life in fraught proximity. Bennett suggests that animals are deployed to assert a theory of Black sociality and to combat dominant claims about the limits of personhood. And he turns to the Black radical tradition to challenge the pervasiveness of anti-Blackness in discourses surrounding the environment and animals. Being Property Once Myself is an incisive work of literary criticism and a groundbreaking articulation of undertheorized notions of dehumanization and the Anthropocene.“A gripping work…Bennett’s lyrical lilt in his sharp analyses makes for a thorough yet accessible read.” —LSE Review of Books“These absorbing, deeply moving pages bring to life a newly reclaimed ethics.”—Colin Dayan, author of The Law Is a White Dog“Tremendously illuminating…Refreshing and field-defining.”—Salamishah Tillet, author of Sites of Slavery

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One of the most influential works of literature during the abolitionist movement of the early nineteenth century, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass recounts with powerful eloquence and detail the author’s life as a slave and his eventual escape to the North. This Norton Library edition features the original 1845 text and explanatory endnotes that clarify obscure terms and references. An introduction by Joshua Bennett provides historical background, highlights some of the narrative’s key themes, and assesses the enduring legacy of Frederick Douglass’s vital work.

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