TY - JOUR
AU - Karpinski, Max
AB - “This is you beyond you … . After and with a multitude of small and large present apocalypses. After the end of the world as we know it. After the ways we have been knowing the world.” Alexis Pauline Gumbs, M Archive, xi “Where rhythm should be there is space.” Kodwo Eshun, More Brilliant than the Sun, 64 In an early passage from M Archive: After the End of the World (2018), the second in a triptych of experimental book-length poems, Alexis Pauline Gumbs strikingly reconsiders the afterlives of slavery in the epoch we now know as the Anthropocene: the critical black marine biologists, scientists of the dark matter under fathoms, suggest that there may be a causal relationship between the bioluminescence in the ocean and the bones of the millions of transatlantic dead … . now that the bones are there as fine as sand, the marrow like coral to itself, the magnesium and calcium has infiltrated the systems of even the lowest filter feeders. so any light that you find in the ocean right now cannot be separated from the stolen light of those we long for every morning. and I don’t need to remind you that the ocean, that place where the evolutionists and creationists all agree that life began, the source of all the salt we breathed to get here, lives within us. (11) We begin our article with this extended passage as it constellates a set of concerns that develop over the course of Gumbs’s writing, beginning with Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity (2016), M Archive and, most recently Dub: Finding Ceremony (2020). Here, the “scientists of the dark matter under fathoms” look to non-human organisms within benthic zones in order to advance an argument that the massive loss of Black life in the Middle Passage literally transforms the cellular makeup of the world: the ocean itself is constituted by this act of “stolen light.” Gumbs positions the “lowest filter feeders” as kin, intimately entangled with the material bodies of ancestors, while also engaging temporal scales that exceed the human, tuning to the space where all “life began.” In taking seriously the possibility that the “bones” of “those we long for every morning” circulate or “live[] within us,” Gumbs reimagines the Middle Passage’s historical reverberations as generating the possibility for new modes of kinship in the contemporary moment. Her work advances a vision of an interconnected ecological subject with a difference, that is, a subject both grounded in, and originating through, blackness. In short, Gumbs imagines a new type of Black being in the Anthropocene or, as the subtitle of the poem makes clear, “after the end of the world”. As this opening passage demonstrates, and as we will argue throughout this article, we read Gumbs’s triptych as interrogating the ways that Black studies reorganizes what might be termed Anthropocene criticism in the humanities, and vice versa. It is, in fact, the looping and feedback between contemporary ecological theory and Black studies that we find of particular interest in Gumbs. In this way, our reading of Gumbs’s poetry builds upon the foundational work of Sonya Posmentier, who traces “how black writing yields theories of environmental relation rooted in the particularities of black history, black experience, and black aesthetics” (4). In our reading, Spill, M Archive, and Dub do not simply deploy the work of Black, feminist, and decolonial theorists to intervene in, or critique, the universalism “and” species-level thinking of Anthropocene theory; rather, in Gumbs’s poetry, Black studies and environmental thought animate one another through co-constitutional inflection points, making it clear that to imagine blackness requires ecology and, more importantly, ecology requires an understanding of blackness. We want to be clear, however, that we are not trying to collapse either Black studies or contemporary ecological critique into one another. In drawing together these potentially nonaligned modes of thought, we remain sensitive to what Phanuel Antwi and David Chariandy identify as the tendency of some critics of Black literature to present “Black literary labour, in its variegated expansive self, [as] not for itself,” but rather “becom[ing] the ground upon which ostensibly ‘higher’ issues are discussed” (35). Rather than privileging the Anthropocene’s universalizing claims, we put pressure on this critical impulse by positioning Gumbs’s poetics as an attempt to represent the fullness of Black ontologies.1 The passage above, for example, does not locate the Middle Passage as an originary rupture,2 but posits a worldview in which the lost can be perceived as felt presences in the everyday, or in which, to draw on Joshua Bennett, “the haunting presence of the Middle Passage is recalibrated toward imagining an elsewhere”—an otherwise—“where black life can flourish” (109). Gumbs is not invested in making more elastic the Anthropocene’s supposedly universal subject to include Black being. Her poetry thinks outside of these metrics, offering the contours of a Black ecology above and beyond the species-level thinking of the Anthropocene.3 In our reading, this gathering of ancestors, which becomes an ever-expanding category that implicates myriad non-humans, offers glimpses of provisional and hopeful openings within what Christina Sharpe identifies as the “climate of antiblackness” (106).4 Beyond an attention to the ways Gumbs draws together thematic concerns associated both with Black studies and Anthropocene critique, we read the particular form that she develops, in which each poem responds to or follows from a specific line, sentence, phrase, or word in a source text, as enacting a dub poetics. Each work in Gumbs’s trilogy is written as a direct response to a specific theorist: Spill is written in response to Hortense Spillers, M Archive is written to M. Jacqui Alexander, and Dub is written to Sylvia Wynter. The texts are book-length poems that draw inspiration from each of their source texts, following unexpected lines of flights to build their own knotted, poetic worlds. In approaching Gumbs’s triptych, we consider her citational practice as reflective of what is known in dub reggae as a riddim. A riddim is “the generic rhythm pattern that could be reused in multiple recordings” (Jasen 175), and is continually reinterpreted by each musician, producer, deejay, and vocalist to make the track their own. In our reading, the work of Spillers, Alexander, and Wynter provide Gumbs’s riddims, forming the backbone of her reinterpretations, remixes, and reinventions of these three pillars of decolonial, feminist, Black thought. More than just a formal structure, in Gumbs’s triptych dub becomes a method, mode, and affect of/for writing contemporary blackness in the context of global, environmental catastrophe. Reaching across time and space, the riddims of her poems allow her to imagine the type of alternate relationalities that are in excess of both the present and the human, the type of kinships and beings we gloss above. As Isis Semaj-Hall writes, dub as a formal structure “echoes the past, reflects the present, and anticipates the future in its very production” (“Re-Membering”).5 Likewise, rather than merely analyzing dub in these texts, we offer this collaborative paper as itself an experiment in dub methodologies. Following the speculative mode of Gumbs’s formal incorporation of dub, our paper plays with Alexander Weheliye’s notion of doing theoretical work in the mix. As Weheliye writes: “translating DJing into the language of literary studies … [constitutes] an embrace of certain forms of chaos or entropy in which lacunae, fractures, and inconsistencies are allowed to spawn their own skewed logics and velocities” (Phonographies 203–04). Weheliye outlines a critical and literary form that creates conditional assemblages across multiple texts via the formal methods of a DJ, mixing records and pieces of those records together. In this methodological provisionality, we see a new type of literary and critical form particularly suited for both Black and Anthropocene studies. This is a way of using the role of the literary critic to rehearse and address the scalar distortions of the Anthropocene and antiblackness by cobbling together arpeggios, melodies, and beats across texts. Thinking in the mix offers a model for holding together a variety of modes of reading and approaches to Gumbs’s poetics simultaneously. In this paper, that is, we draw together literary close reading, historicization, Black sound and technology studies, environmental humanities, Anthropocene theory, and contemporary Black studies. Our gambit is that each of these critical and methodological grooves is audible throughout and yet pitched at different levels, sometimes resonating, sometimes a little noisy or even cacophonous (what a DJ might call a “train wreck”). In this way, our paper attempts to model the types of experimental and tentative methodologies we need to understand the twinned crises of race and the environment in our contemporary moment. To make this argument, our paper starts with a critique of existing Anthropocene theory. Tracing the ascendancy of the Anthropocene as analytic category in the humanities, we argue that this nascent critical hegemony obscures the ways in which analogous questions of extinction, scale, and the human have been recurrent thematics of Black cultural production and Black studies for hundreds of years. Bringing our own work into line with another emerging tradition of criticism that questions the Anthropocene’s universalizing tendencies, we explore how Gumbs’s work offers literary tools for thinking through what blackness looks like, to use Gumbs’s phrase that we will continually remix, “after the end of the world.” In the final section of this paper, we turn to the formal possibilities of dub, looking at how Gumbs’s formal employment of riddims transforms dub poetry in general by creating a provisional ecology that is entangled across time and space with other beings. In a world that is increasingly defined by accelerating racial and environmental violence, it is becoming clear that we need as many tools as possible to dismantle systemic modes of oppression and destruction. Our paper finishes with the poetic and political possibilities of dub as a way to continue amplifying alternative modes of combatting environmental degradation and antiblackness. 1. The “Shock” of the Anthropocene In an introduction to one of the earliest collections of essays detailing the ramifications of the Anthropocene for the social sciences and humanities, Clive Hamilton, Christophe Bonneuil, and François Gemenne write: If we are entering an era beyond the experience of human beings, it is one for which there has been no biological adaptation and no cultural learning or transmission to prepare us for the kind of environmental/geological changes that loom. This constitutes a new human condition. Nothing could call more insistently for new social sciences and humanities research, for the human being who finds itself in this uncertain and radically new age is above all an assemblage of social systems, institutions and representations. (5) Now, five years after the publication of this collection, the subjunctive “if” that starts this passage has become markedly dated. It seems fairly uncontroversial to say that, as a cultural and geological category, the Anthropocene has become axiomatic in both the humanities and social sciences. What remains telling in the above passage is the way in which the authors highlight an ontologically and epistemologically new way of understanding the relationship between human and world. This new epoch brings with it a concomitant “new human condition” and demands the interrogation of our attending “social systems, institutions and representations.” Writing elsewhere, Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz take this position further, no longer couching their language in ambiguity: “The Anthropocene is an event, a point of bifurcation in the history of the Earth, life and humans. It overturns our representations of the world” (45). The problem of “representation” is a common refrain in the growing canon of Anthropocene criticism. The paradigm shift inaugurated by this geological epoch transforms how we view the world and our place in and of it. This transformation, so the argument goes, marks a qualitative difference from all that has come before. To get a sense of how this has played out in terms of representation, take, for example, this paragraph from Timothy Clark’s (2015) book on literary criticism and the Anthropocene, Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene blurs and even scrambles some crucial categories by which people have made sense of the world and their lives. It puts in crisis the lines between culture and nature, fact and value, and between the human and the geological or meteorological. As a bewildering and often destructive contamination of human aims and natural causality, the Anthropocene manifests itself in innumerable possible hairline cracks in the familiar life-world, at the local and personal scale of each individual life. (9–10) In Clark’s analysis, lines, scales, and boundaries blur with the intrusion of the Anthropocene as epistemological and ontological category. At the same time, the immediacy with which we have to think through disparate temporal scalings is also transformed, as “the local and personal scale of each individual life” is now written with an asterisk to signal the possibilities of a future extinction, what Richard Grusin describes as “a future world in which human presence on Earth has been reduced to a lithic layer” (vii). There is, without a doubt, a very real political validity to these valences of urgency. At the time of writing this paper, for example, the atmospheric CO2 concentration is at 417.1 ppm. But there is also an occlusion that is performed in this fetishization of the newness of the Anthropocene. To insist on the novelty of the ontological condition of the Anthropocene is to overlook the ways in which certain Black, Indigenous, and people of colour (BIPOC) theorists have already been thinking through scales beyond and/or outside the human. As both the epigraph and the quotation from M Archive that opens this paper demonstrate, Gumbs’s hybrid poetic-critical texts are attuned to the possibility of this occlusion. M Archive is written in an unknown future where environmental destruction has wiped out life as we know it. In the first entry to “Archive of Dirt: What We Did,” an early section of the text, the narrator of the poem thinks back to a moment clearly modeled on our present: “anything they wanted to know about the earth and what would happen if they ignored it, they could have learned by watching the old, curved brown women everywhere. but mostly they ignored those women. just like they ignored the world shaking around them. to their doom” (35). As “doom” enters the horizon and the world shakes, there are certain bodies, Gumbs writes, that have already foretold that apocalypse. This is not to say there is some sort of natural, symbiotic knowledge between the “curved brown women” that Gumbs describes and the world writ large.6 We are not, that is, attempting to colonize and conscript Black life and Black studies into an Anthropocenic discourse that risks re-installing what Katherine McKittrick would describe as a framework “that corresponds with our existing system of knowledge, one that has already posited blackness and a black sense of place as dead and dying” (16). Rather, we want to draw attention to the contingencies of any articulation of the contours of the Anthropocene, while also reading Gumbs’s poetry in relation to contemporary work in Black ecological studies that examines how Black cultural producers “aesthetically reconstitute the (un)limits of humanity and construct alternative conceptions of ecological ethics within our present world and beyond it” (Frazier 40). The claim that we are making through and with Gumbs is that the violence of extinction premised by the Anthropocene only signals a sea change for a particular segment of the Anthropos. Our revision into the newness of Anthropocene discourse, we should add, mixes a specific modulation of ecological theory. Just as quickly as the Anthropocene began to percolate through literary discourse, its nomenclature and attending ontological and epistemological premises have been contested. David Farrier offers a particularly pointed example of this mode of critique, which highlights the Anthropocene’s asymmetries: “Anthropocentrism is a pitfall of the Anthropocene … . In particular, the danger is that real lives are subsumed by humanity thought in the abstract, a flattened worldview that disregards the fact that the ‘we’ of the Anthropocene is profoundly conflicted, composed of extremely mismatched orders of culpability and exposure” (16). Pushing back against the solidity of any sort of interpellation into a universal “we,” Farrier is quick to signal the “real lives” and violence that are lost in a “flattened” ontology. Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, in a register similar to Farrier, summarizes the range of critical approaches to the problem of a universalist subsumption that has plagued theorizations of the Anthropocene: Thus, a decade after the coining of the term ‘Anthropocene’ we begin to see the start of a robust dialogue about the origins of our environmental crisis—variously attributed to the dominance of capitalism (Capitalocene, Econocene, Necrocene), transatlantic empire (Plantationocene), patriarchy (Manthropocene), European/white settler colonialism (Eurocene), twentieth-century globalization and its regimes of disposability (Plasticene), or all of the above and their engagements with a frightening alterity (Chthulucene). (22) These critiques question not just the Anthropocene’s temporal start date, but also its narration and geography, forcing us to think of history in all its textures and varietals rather than just its stratigraphic signature.7 Nowhere is this critique as forceful as in Kathryn Yusoff’s A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. There, Yusoff argues: The Anthropocene might seem to offer a dystopic future that laments the end of the world, but imperialism and ongoing (settler) colonialisms have been ending worlds for as long as they have been in existence. The Anthropocene as a politically infused geology and scientific/popular discourse is just now noticing the extinction it has chosen to continually overlook in the making of its modernity and freedom. (11–12) Yusoff rehistoricizes the Anthropocene by disrupting its “universalist geologic commons” (14) and looking at the ways in which alternative Anthropocenes, with their differing focuses and emphases, are not just exercises in nomenclature but are, in fact, “intensely political in how they draw the world of the present into being” (34). Underlying Yusoff’s argument is a claim that itself could have been lifted from Gumbs: “The end of the world has already happened for some subjects” (Yusoff 22). There is, in fact, a counter-history to the current Anthropocene epoch wherein some populations have always operated under the type of ontological erasure premised by the Anthropocene. As both Yusoff and Gumbs suggest, after the end of the world is not necessarily a futural claim, but one that defines the present. 2. Reading Otherwise in the Anthropocene While this is a necessary starting point for any type of critique that wants to think through the relationship between race and ecology, it is still a starting point. It is not our intent to merely debunk the potential and actual racisms in and of Anthropocene criticism. Rather, we want to think generatively about the animating possibilities that exist at the nexus of ecology and Black studies. In particular, we want to consider what role literary studies, as both heuristic device and material practice, might take after the end of the world. Gumbs’s work understands the way that rethinking the scale of the human has been a cornerstone of Black studies and how this can produce alternate modes of thought. To take just two examples that are major touchstones for Gumbs, Saidiya Hartman and Sylvia Wynter, we can trace both theorists’ continual negotiation of how effective a scale the human is as a vessel for and measurement of subjectivity. In Scenes of Subjection, which Gumbs remixes in the subtitle of Spill, Hartman is quick to critique the fact that “the appellation ‘human’ can be borne equally by all” (6). For Hartman, the problem isn’t just a matter of giving Black bodies the same “entitlements of whiteness” but rather a structural abrasion in the “formal equality” of personhood as such that will always view “blackness” as less than human (116). Even more forcefully, Wynter’s oeuvre is based around a rethinking of what constitutes the human and specifically what she identifies as “Man,” a preconceived and stable subject, coded masculine and white, that operates as the very arbiter of humanness. As she writes in terms that mirror certain registers of the Anthropocene debate: [A]ll our present struggles with respect to race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, struggles over the environment, global warming, severe climate change, the sharply unequal distribution of the earth resources … these are all differing facets of the central ethnoclass Man vs. Human struggle. (260–61) Wynter delineates a similar contestation as Hamilton, Bonneuil, and Gemenne, but infuses it with the granularity of the “ethnoclass.” In this way, Wynter is able to not just critique “Man” but to also move across the scalar differentials that make up “Man,” whether they be gender, race, class, etc. We understand Wynter’s foundational critical work as, in part, directed towards what Weheliye identifies as “the transformation of the human into a heuristic model and not an ontological fait accompli” (Habeas 8). In unsettling the calcified figure of Man, what is at stake for Wynter and the myriad theorists and philosophers who draw on her thought is the movement towards the possibility of an unfolding humanity that is constantly negotiated in relation.8 In our reading, this heuristic model of the human, in lieu of the “ontological fait accompli” of the Anthropos, provides the structural conditions for thinking through the twinned catastrophes of climatic destruction and antiblackness in the present. To reiterate, if the crisis of the Anthropocene names the moment in which humanity gets bundled together under the threat of imminent extinction, then this is hardly new for those that have never signified as human and whose existence has always been on the brink of extinction. Put another way, Anthropocene critique needs to learn to listen to the types of work being done in Black studies and “recognize the work of Afrodiasporic ecopoetics—and black study more broadly—as species thinking, as ecological thought at the end of the world” (Bennett 111).9 Recent work in Black studies has made this necessity even more pronounced by looking at how environmental crisis and the attending climatic and ontological instability provide ways to animate the equally pervasive and scalarly enlarged crises of antiblackness.10 The problematics of scale, what Farrier calls the Anthropocene’s “provocations” to “rethink and reconfigure our relations” (17), are already part and parcel of the larger project of Black studies of moving outside of human scales, temporally, spatially, epistemologically, and ontologically. Black feminist studies, in particular, already imagines, as Sharpe has it, the possibility of “seeing and reading otherwise” by expanding ontological and analytical scales “toward reading and seeing something in excess of what is caught in frame” (117). This is a literary and theoretical praxis that, as Gumbs writes in Spill, “invite[s] futures with different angles, prismatic possibilities” (101). In the short introductory essays to her two later texts, M Archive and Dub, Gumbs makes clear that thinking outside of the metric of the human is the foundational building block of her poetry. Those “prismatic possibilities” beyond the human, first gestured to in Spill, are pitched higher in the mix in her latter two works. “This book centers Black life,” she writes in the preface to M Archive, “in a way that doesn’t seek to prove that Black people are human but instead calls preexisting definitions of the human into question … . This book offers a possibility of being beyond the human and an invitation into the blackness of what we cannot know from here” (xi). Gumbs makes explicit that her rewriting of Black life is yoked to both a foreclosure on the human and a temporal rescaling. The conflation of blackness and unknowability that opens M Archive resonates in multiple ways. First, we can understand it in relation to that promise of a “being beyond the human”; to draw on Wynter, “the blackness of what we cannot know from here” appears as the possibility of blackness as human that undoes those inherited and prescriptive iterations of the human as Man. But Gumbs also invites the reader into the speculative and generative possibility of imagining possible futures. In this sense, “the blackness of what we cannot know from here” becomes both a transformation of the human in and through blackness—a human-to-come—and a future “at once out of reach and immanent” (Reed 22). The speculative futural tense that opens onto “prismatic possibilities” is visible most clearly in “baskets of yes,” near the conclusion of M Archive, where Gumbs moves into a prophetic, and decidedly optimistic, register: there did come a moment when the species was united on the planet as human, but it was not what anyone had dreamt. and it was too late to truly benefit those of us who had been called alien. we who had nonconsensually generated the human across time. it was what the Black speculative feminists called ‘the Butlerian moment.’ the more musical among them said ‘Octavian Overture.’ that moment when it was time to leave. when the true others finally arrived. (171) In this passage, Gumbs seems to parody the type of Anthropocene thinking many have cleaved to in the face of the imminent destruction of the planet.11 This passage, however, narrates the emergence of a universal category with a difference. This alternative species-level collective is “not what anyone had dreamt”; it does not, indeed can not, emerge while “those of us who had been called alien” still “nonconsensually generate[] the human.” Gumbs echoes Wynter explicitly, showing how those who are denied access to the category of Man are necessary for Man’s very reproduction. To draw on Axelle Karera, this passage demonstrates how Gumbs’s poetics “interrogate[s] the very foundations of becoming—of this ‘we’ to come,” while also imagining a future in which blackness operates as “a decisive organizing principle” (45). The passage imagines a transformative precipice—“the Butlerian moment”—just over the horizon. The humans-to-come are “the true others,” absolutely unlike Man with his categories (“those of us who had been called alien”) that continue to reproduce the exclusions and inequalities of the contemporary. By invoking a tradition of Black speculative fiction via Octavia Butler references, Gumbs also suggests that the transformations imagined by her triptych are explicitly literary. As Mark Rifkin argues in the context of Black writing and speculative fiction, this generic turn offers a way out of the impasse of “[the] erasure of the past for Blacks in the diaspora as a result of the transatlantic slave trade [which] produces something like a temporal vacuum” (63). Even more important for thinking in the Anthropocene, this orientation is tied to an “ethos of ontological multiplicity” (10) that thinks outside the strictures and structures of humanism, and that “proliferate[s] potentials for seeing differently” (68). M Archive itself functions as a tracing of the archival and geological remnants of human life; that is, life before the emergence of that universal category with a difference. Early in the text, the narrator describes the search by those “true others” for the “traces of the human we had been”: “all they found were these round and gleaming stones. it was poetic for them, given the shape of the planet itself” (13). This is not a lament for the species, but a sort of punning that rethinks the narrative mode with which the human as category is reproduced. Following her own words in the introductory essay to Dub, we might understand part of the project of Gumbs’s triptych as simultaneously troubling and reimagining the “story that we told ourselves about what being human is and what nature is” (Dub, xi). If M Archive uses a futural tense to rethink the human, there is an even more explicitly ecological tenor in how Gumbs approaches the category of the human in Dub: “I began to understand that the scientific taxonomy of what constituted a species or which family, phyla, genus … a particular form of life was, was as debatable and discursively unstable as the narratives within my family of who was an inside or an outside child” (xii). Throughout Dub, Gumbs tunes to non-human rhythms as a way to move outside of the ontological priority of the human. This comes to a head in a section towards the end of the text titled “blood chorus,” which deploys song to invert the expected imagery of blood as yoked to kinship and familial lines. Gumbs sounds out blood outside of human ontologies: “us? we let the whales name us. deep with their moaning … / us? it was the turtles named us. with the scraping of their walking, with our scraping out their insides” (205). We hear an echo of the bioluminescent corals from M Archive surfacing again as one of the kinfolk in a distributed web of kinship ties. This resonance across disparate texts mirrors the repetition in the form of the poem, which continues: “who? us? we lost our names in fires and when the boat crashed and the crop broke … / me? i let them call me what they wanted to call me … / you? we made your name from fragments. from memories and accidents” (205). While “blood chorus” is explicit in its unseating of human exceptionalism via an ever-expanding vision and mesh of kinship, this section also opens onto what we described earlier as Gumbs’s dub poetics. Like a dub riddim, Gumbs iterates on the question of names and pronouns, changing each line slightly in the movement from non-human interstices (“we let the whales name us”) to self-articulation (“we found new names”) (205). Near the conclusion of “blood chorus,” formal repetition accrues an ethical dimension: at some point we all had to learn how to see the invisible. the unborn, the unremembered, the discounted, ourselves. we would have had to add the spirit to the air if it wasn’t already thick with it. for us it was a matter of what you call love. thick relation. what you call ritual. repetitive action … . we made meaning out of the mess by what we did. and what we continued to do. once is a moment. twice is time travel. there are very few things you are doing for the first time. (212) Here “ritual” and “repetitive action” become the way towards “see[ing] the invisible.” We are inclined to read this in the context of the line we have traced from the beginning of M Archive about the material presences of “those we long for.” To “see the invisible,” then, becomes an enactment of “love” or “thick relation.” Repetition and re-iteration—recall the unique form of Gumbs’s poetry, improvising on a word, phrase, or sentence from a source text—draws these relations into presence. This dub poetics becomes a formal mode that simultaneously returns to and builds with the labors of ancestors while generating speculative visions of possible futures after the end of the world. As Gumbs describes this dub logic in M Archive, “their bodies were repeating, not like reproduction, like the rhythm of a poem” (55). 3. Dub Ecologies Before turning to the generative possibilities of Gumbs’s particular iteration of dub poetics, it is worth briefly tracing the genre through its roots to its contemporary manifestations. Dub, as a musical form, originated in Jamaican sound system culture in the late 1960s and described the process of removing the vocals from ska and reggae tracks and remixing them, either with new vocals or as instrumentals, but focusing explicitly on the track’s low-end sounds, particularly bass. As Weheliye describes the process, “Jamaican producers started messing with the musical text via technological means—loosening its confines, turning up the bass and drum in the mix, distorting and displacing the centrality of the voice, opening it up to the cosmos” (Phonographies 102). Dub poetry quickly emerged shortly thereafter, not just in Jamaica, but also in diasporic communities in cities like Toronto and London. Dub poets, most famously Linton Kwesi Johnson, would read poems over dub reggae tracks, adopting the structure of dub reggae into their writing. For both dub and dub poetics, the focus is not on singularly stable or finished texts. In this sense, dub looks for an alternative mode of signification that is always shifting. As Louis Chude-Sokei points out, “[Dub] is more of a process than a genre” (163) and the process of dubbing is a way to blur the “very distinctions between real and virtual, sound and echo” (164). Importantly, dub is also a way of sounding out a mode of listening that is outside of the human.12 As one of the first theorists of Black electronic music more generally, Kodwo Eshun’s seminal More Brilliant than the Sun reconstructs the history of dub music, describing how musicians like Lee “Scratch” Perry would literally go into speakers and reconfigure the wires to produce soundwaves and frequencies inaudible to human ears. Eshun writes: “Dub demands symbiosis that externalizes the mind, drastically reconfiguring the human producer into a machine being, an audio cyborg” (63). Eshun’s description of dub is instructive in alerting us to the ways in which the form names a mode of thought and construction outside human demarcations, tapping into an alternate Black futurity through sonic waveforms. “Instead of stability, tradition, patriarchy, and continuity,” Chude-Sokei writes, “[dub] presents a world uprooted and mechanized, where race and history are thrust into an unforgivably creole simulacra” (165).13 Similarly, Weheliye points to the ways that the bass modulation of dub makes it “attuned to the lower sonic-cum-spectral frequencies of the past” (Phonographies 103).14 But alongside this conjuration of the past, like Gumbs’s “ancestors” in M Archive, there is also a futural element to dub; the riddim, the building block of dub, recalls not just the past and the present via the original track from which it is derived, but also extends forward in time as material for future mixes.15 Where Gumbs’s work differs from other dub poetry is in the way she deploys these riddims. In her dub poetics, the riddims are written text that move backwards and forwards in time both diegetically (that is, they resurface and echo at different points within each individual text) and non-diegetically (they also reappear in later texts, calling back to their earlier iterations). This is central to the construction of all three texts in the triptych but is molded paradigmatically in Spill. The text is built around different definitions of the verb “spill” and, as noted above, Gumbs grounds the collection in the writing of Hortense Spillers. This formal strategy constitutes at once another iteration of the ecological thinking we have traced throughout Gumbs, a repetition-with-a-difference that “verbs” Spillers and her work, while also foregrounding etymologies to rethink the inherited weight of language and the theory from which the text emerges. In other words, Gumbs moves outside the analytical mode of, as one reviewer puts it, writing “about black feminist thinkers” to a way of writing “with them” (“Spill” 65; emphasis added). Spill takes the source material of Spillers and reshapes it into a continual mesh of rereading. The mother of the protagonist in the text thinks about the unbounded mode of the riddim as directly related to a new way of reading: “she untaught herself to read and imagined that if she worked day and night her conscience would be freed” (38). This unteaching is another site where we start to see Gumbs’s alternative Black ecology emerge through thinking outside inherited syntaxes and hermeneutics. Much as Gumbs turns the verb spill over and over, proliferating its varied meanings, the citation and deployment of Spillers, as interlocutor and critical authority, transforms her texts from static objects of knowledge into something processual, intimate, and seeking out new harmonies with a world in flux. To make more legible the ways in which Gumbs’s dub poetics transforms the work of the theorists she takes up as her interlocutors, we can look to both Spillers’s and Gumbs’s descriptions of their respective critical projects. Spillers opens “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” by enumerating the names of the “marked woman” and describing the overdetermination of Black female subjectivity: “In order for me to speak a truer word concerning myself, I must strip down through layers of attenuated meanings, made an excess in time, over time, assigned by a particular historical order, and there await whatever marvels of my own inventiveness” (65). In the introduction to Spill, Gumbs seems to respond to precisely this moment: “I started this experiment thinking that I could take specific phrases from particular essays in Black, White, and in Color out of context, and then I realized that I couldn’t take them out of context. Or that context couldn’t take them at all. Which is to say that when I turned these phrases, doors opened and everyone came through” (xii). We can think of Gumbs's project as an attempt to enact what Spillers describes: taking a phrase, stripping away “attenuated meanings,” and dubbing it in search of those “marvels of my own inventiveness.” But Gumbs also notes that her initial approach was impossible. There is no “truer word” underneath the “excess,” or, put slightly differently, the “excess” and “attenuated meanings” constitute one element of the ground from which Black subjectivity articulates itself. There isn’t, in short, a singular reading that emerges from the text, but rather a network of meanings that mix and remix one another. What dub provides for Gumbs is a shift in the description of how blackness reimagines itself; dub’s very form lays bare that “inventiveness” need not be understood as an individual act, but is referential and intrinsically relational. Gumbs’s dub poetics embodies a collaborative ethos that operates as a thickening of kinship and relationality across time and space. She clarifies that her mode of composition represents a different type of critical engagement with the archive. Recalling her description of Spillers’s phrases opening “doors,” Gumbs explains the way in which her remixes, to return to Weheliye, “spawn their own skewed logics and velocities,” and her work as poet is to trace these logics and velocities as they continue “looking sideways at each other and a world” (Spill xi). To see how this works, we can consider this passage in Spill from “What She Did Not Say.” The section opens with a dedication to Phillis Wheatley before describing a scene of composition: sits facing pane wondering who will vouch for black ink shaped by her deep-lined hands brown as oak and interlaced now. and who will be a witness and what drum call remember. the sound of her writing is the quietest dance made to tiptoe over ocean. tree floor drum trunk may you reach. mother tilt back west and hear me (63). Working across temporal and spatial scales, the poem depicts a poetic synesthesia where writing becomes “the quietest dance” and where the sound of the “drum” is asked to “witness.” Gumbs translates the sonic effects of dub into a literary mode, imagining writing as riddim. Moreover, she uses an address to Wheatley as a way to think about both the still-immediate violence of slavery in the future tense “will,” while also calling back to the kinship lines that connect her across time to Wheatley. At the same time, this section of the poem adds to the mix its iteration of the verb spill. “What She Did Not Say” is structured around the definition of “spill” as “reveal (confidential information) to someone” (62). There is a sinister valence to this definition as Gumbs uses Wheatley’s writing to think about how “black ink” is burdened with revealing the buried narratives of slavery while also questioning the role of, and access to, the figure of the “witness.” As with her use of the “Octavian Overture,” Gumbs considers the relationship between writing and being that burdens Black bodies. In the footnote that closes this section, we are drawn to a quotation from Black, White, and In Color: “perhaps a window onto the soul of this reader!” (33). Gumbs strips away the neutrality of the verb spill’s intent to “reveal” and troubles the entanglements of narrative, slavery, and humanity through the act of revelation. But instead of looking externally for someone to bear witness and, therefore, fall into the scripts of a textual humanism that underwrites the reproduction of Wynter’s “Man,” the Spillers citation itself acts as an immanent textual witness through the footnote. This intertextual call-and-response, a punning on how continuity enacts difference, creates a mix between Wheatley, Spillers, and Gumbs. Each of these authors writes to and with each other across a phrase, their respective works continually animating our ability to read them.16 Beyond the collaborative animations of Wheatley, Spillers, and Gumbs, the passage quoted above from “What She Did Not Say” is also ripe with an ontological slipperiness, as “oak,” “ocean,” “tree,” and “trunk” scale beyond human metrics of writing and narrative. Indeed, a more explicitly non-human dimension emerges later in Spill, linking the poem’s dub formal qualities to scales outside the human: only i believed the space-time continuum couldn’t hold as much of me as i was able to accept. especially not in multiple bodies. especially not through you … . i was afraid of dying. i was afraid of becoming God. it was the seventh day. and i refused to rest. and i refused to say that it was good. she looked at herself in the mirror and all over the dance floor and flashing out on the tv and wondered how did i spill. how did i spill out everywhere? (105) Thinking outside and across scales, the narrator becomes multiple, shifting between the “i” of the lyric poem and the “she” of the protagonist seamlessly and fluidly. At the same time, there is an acknowledgment of the limits of the individual body as vessel.17 Furthermore, in this image of creation, the speaker “refuse[s] rest” and commits to the continual rearticulation of the world—“i refused to say that it was good.” There is a sonic element in this passage, from the doubled repetitions in the first paragraph (“especially not,” “i was afraid,” “and i refused”) to the polysyndeton of “and” in the second. The “dance floor” emerges as the site that flashes this recognition of the limits of personhood, and perhaps where new worlds can be repeatedly called into presence. This is a dub poetics that fashions what, elsewhere in Dub, Gumbs calls “an intimate knowledge of impermanence” (242). The passage concludes with a moment of dubbing, the repetition of “how did i spill” mimicking the repetition of the riddim, with the word “spill” itself cutting across the entire poem at a sub-bass frequency. To pause and harmonize these disparate strains of analysis, what we are suggesting is that Gumbs’s dub poetics open onto an ecological and racial otherwise. As early as Spill, the contours of a new type of Black ontology are present. In the final section of the poem, which is primarily focused on the relationship between a mother and a daughter, Gumbs writes: “her fingerprints rewritten rivers of coconut oil and shea. strands the geological memories punctuating the groove and hands god herself who moves and moves” (145). Locked in the groove of the riddim and the dance, Gumbs uses the formal strategies of dub as a way to shift the grooves of geology. But equally important in this enactment of dub is that these grooves constitute a punctuation, rather than a puncture. Instead of understanding blackness as sutured to a break or an aporia, Gumbs’s poetry embraces the continuity suggested by the groove. Fred Moten has recently revisited the value of thinking of Black art in terms of breaks, arguing that “Black art neither sutures nor is sutured to trauma. There’s no remembering, no healing. There is, rather, a perpetual cutting, a constancy of expansive and enfolding rupture and wound, a rewind that tends to exhaust the metaphysics upon which it is grounded” (Black ix). Here, Moten highlights his earlier maxim of working in the break to suggest a number of important ideas for thinking generatively after the end of the human. First, Moten refuses to identify a traumatic origin story but posits an entirely new mode of being outside “the metaphysics upon which it is grounded.” Second, he shifts the terms of critique into a “perpetual cutting.” To return to Gumbs’s triptych, we do not want to suggest that she simply rewrites a critical archive or debunks specific ideologies. Rather Spill, M Archive, and Dub work in the mode of a dubbed ecology that perpetually cuts, shifts, and modulates between scales, rendering it possible to rethink the stratigraphic ghettoization of Black being. A key passage from “Remembering” in Dub brings together the ecology of dub and its ability to think in these generative terms. Calling on her “kindred beyond taxonomy,” that is, the “never-considered-human … whales, corals, barnacles, bacteria, and more” (Dub xii), the speaker articulates a fluid ontology that links beings across the ocean and cosmos: when they made me they tapped on the sound between the stars until it rang clear enough to call them back to what they came to do. the sound dispersed across centuries, the rhythm speeding and slowing with the urgency of particular times and particular tides and the particular curves of particular orbits. what you see is just a particle. what can be held by sound, what can seem solid all this movement, a shimmering stillness so you can know. but the important thing is not to look. it is to listen and find the rhythm. is it speeding up or slowing down. tap tap. tap tap. (29) At the substantive level, Gumbs looks to non-human metrics, thinking in terms of galaxies that extend beyond our heliocentric imaginaries. At the same time, this passage oscillates between the “particular” and the transtemporal and spatial. Gumbs imagines a mode of being that is yoked to “particular times” while also “dispersed across centuries” and that is brought into cohabitation by sound, shifting from the visual into the sonic via a mandate to “listen and find the rhythm.”18 We can trace “the rhythm” in the repetitions of “particular,” sliding eventually into “a particle.” Other words seem to bounce off one another rhythmically, the slight lexical shift from “times” to “tides” repeating the sameness-with-a-difference logic of the “particular” and “particle.” This is the logic named earlier, in the refusal to “rest” on the “dance floor” and the simultaneously utopian and dub impulse to call forth “futures” shot through with “prismatic possibilities.” The poem closes, of course, with the bare building blocks of a riddim, the incantatory “tap tap.” Dub’s ability to repeat as it morphs allows for a new type of Black being to emerge in Gumbs’s work, a being attuned to a type of non-human ecology outside of prescriptive human metrics. M Archive imagines how the end of the world itself might be reiterated as a riddim. While there is certainly a violence that underpins the apocalyptic context of M Archive, it is also possible to read an agentive latitude grasping for air in the text. We learn, after all, that the subjects that make up that universal category with a difference “had to re-rhythm everything, re-tune bass in their chest” (100). Through the processual nature of mixing and remixing Gumbs foregrounds how dub creates a new type of ecological being. The riddim, as it reshapes itself both autopoetically and communally, moves outside the individual and implicates those distributed kinship networks of ancestors lost and ancestors “never-considered-human.” We see this in M Archive: “we never put ourselves back together in the same way again. it was a daily practice, slowly changing our sound from the inside, chanting and singing and listening deeper, moving in response to older harmonies than the reactive ones around” (78). Here dub’s transtemporal structure is made explicit. The futural self that Gumbs imagines as exceeding the “same way” emerges through a tuning to “older harmonies.” The collective act of the “daily practice” of incantation allow for this type of deep listening that changes the constitution of the self. In this way, the dub poetics of Gumbs perform a critical intervention into the Anthropocene humanisms that reproduce inequality and inequity, while also offering an otherwise after the end of the human as such. Dub is a commitment to an understanding of the subject as constantly unsettled and recomposed, drawing and building on the labor of a capaciously imagined ancestry. The dub poetics that Gumbs develops through Spill, M Archive, and Dub simultaneously narrates and formalizes molecular transformation, calling into presence a mode of being that scales across the twinned crises of race and the environment that define the contemporary moment. Crucially, this is a mode of being that takes seriously the racial violence that has underwritten the emergence of this geological epoch, and the uneven distribution of violence, along racial lines, that continues to be subsumed in many discussions of global crisis. Gumbs’s work, that is, offers a transformative vision of the Anthropocenic emphasis on relationality and non-human entanglements through the cultivation of a Black ontology for the contemporary moment. Her triptych deploys dub to seek out new riddims in and for the Anthropocene, ceaselessly iterating the possibilities of the human after the end of the world. Funding Max Karpinski gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Killam Trusts. Footnotes 1 We understand the emphasis, throughout contemporary Black studies, on the representation of the fullness of Black ontologies as a response to the critical overrepresentation of Black suffering, violence, and exploitation, including, to draw on the key interlocutor of Spill, Hortense Spillers’s notion of the “pornotroping” of the Black body. 2 This would be to reproduce and remain stagnant within what Stephen Best identifies as the “melancholic historicism” of much canonical Black studies which “provides for the view that history consists in the taking possession of such grievous and archival loss” (15). 3 In this sense, Gumbs’s work resonates with the recent writing of Zakiyyah Iman Jackson who sidesteps questions of intelligibility in lieu of new epistemo-ontological modularities: “Consequently, a new epistemology and transformative approach to being is needed rather than the extension of human recognition under the state’s normative conception” (28). There is a similar line of thought in the work of Kara Keeling, who argues that against the dehistoricizing impulses of much ecological theory, “Black existence is the condition of possibility for moving beyond what is” (92). 4 Thinking of a specifically Black ecology, J.T. Roane and Justin Hosbey point to these openings against the backdrop of climatic racism, writing, “Examining Black ecologies draws to light the environmental history sedimented in ongoing unequal exposure but also reveals insurgent visions of an environmental future free of the relations and geographies engendered by the racial capitalocene.” In our reading of Gumbs’s triptych, of particular interest are the ways in which she imagines Blackness in this “insurgent” modality. 5 Our iteration of dub methodology expands on the work of Semaj-Hall more generally. Semaj-Hall has similarly experimented with “the use of a ‘dub aesthetic’ as a new methodology for analyzing the literature of the Caribbean and its diaspora,” drawing on what she identifies as the “four production techniques that mark classic Jamaican dub music as dub: reverberation, mixing, talk-over, and muting,” and applying them in both literary and critical autobiographical contexts (“Constructing” 96–97). 6 Indeed, this conflation of Black bodies and the natural world has a long racist history that leads to a complex and often paradoxical relationship between racialized bodies and the natural world. As Paul Outka writes in his history of this relationship, Race and Nature, “[Slavery’s] legacy—in which whites viewed black people as part of the natural world, and then proceeded to treat them with the same mixture of contempt, false reverence, and real exploitation that also marks American environmental history—inevitably makes the possibility of an uncomplicated union with the natural world less readily available to African Americans than it has been to whites who, by and large, have not suffered from such a history” (3). 7 As Françoise Vergès eloquently phrases it, before adding her own “racial capitalocene” nomenclature to the mix, “What methodology is needed to write a history of the environment that includes slavery, colonialism, imperialism and racial capitalism, from the standpoint of those who were made into ‘cheap’ objects of commerce, their bodies as objects renewable through wars, capture, and enslavement, fabricated as disposable people, whose lives do not matter?” (162–63). See also Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin’s “Defining the Anthropocene.” 8 Weheliye’s “heuristic” model of the human resonates across both Canadian and American contexts in Black studies. Rinaldo Walcott draws on Nathaniel Mackey to position blackness “as a fluid and tireless performance” (85), while suggesting that it is possible to “understand and at least engage blackness as something that is continually provisional and an act of doing—verbing” (76). Similarly, Fred Moten rereads Aunt Hester’s scream in The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass as both performative and constitutive of Black ontology. In his words, his critical project “attempt[s] to describe the material reproductivity of black performance and to claim for this reproductivity the status of an ontological condition” (In the Break 18). Wynter’s work, of course, is a major touchstone across contemporary Black studies. See Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, Jackson, and Katherine McKittrick’s edited collection, Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis. 9 Beyond the critics we’ve cited above, we also want to note and highlight some of the current work that thinks through the convergence of blackness and Anthropocene theory. In literary studies, Matthew Taylor has turned to writers like Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston, and Frederick Douglass to look at the ways in which their works “anticipate, to a surprising extent” much posthuman philosophy (14–15). Cristin Ellis reaches even further back into postbellum literature “to discern the philosophical commonalities that link antislavery and contemporary posthumanist materialisms” (7). 10 Tiffany Lethabo King’s The Black Shoals, for example, deploys the figure of the shoal, “a geological and oceanic formation” (2) where an area of unchartered water becomes unexpectedly shallow, forcing ships to stop, crash, or change course. For King, there is a doubling in this image that allows her to conceive of the work of Black studies while not remaining bound to human metrics. “The shoal,” she writes, “like Black thought, is a place where momentum and velocity as normal vectors are impeded” and, therefore, “arrests the normative epistemic flow and the violence of the narrativity of humanist thought” (4, 16). 11 Gumbs’s approach to Anthropocene thinking is not limited to parody, however. Elsewhere in M Archive, for example, she critiques the type of apocalyptic narratives that have subsumed the Anthropocene imaginary: “remember when they did all those movies about zombies, but they didn’t include an afro-caribbean cosmology of death and servitude” (75). 12 As Paul Jasen puts it, “The track replaces the song when pieces of music are no longer conceived as complete wholes but as connection machines, designed to be linked together in a desirous assemblage. Tracks are made to be mixed—structured to synchronize and resonate together” (173–74). 13 Semaj-Hall is even more direct here: “[Dub] music is an unfamiliar encounter with the familiar” (“Constructing” 97). Njelle Hamilton expands on this, highlighting dub’s political modality, looking at how the structure of dub does this type of work: “[Dub’s] multitrack form also connotes an artistic practice that allows for the hearing and sounding of multiple voices, of keeping even ghosts of voices present in the mix. Even further, it allows marginalized groups to challenge musical and cultural orthodoxies by reinserting their voices and songs where previously erased” (16). 14 The sub-sonic frequencies of dub are able to tap into what Steven Goodman has described as “bass materialisms” or the “microrhythmic production and occupation of space-times by collectively engineered vibration” (172). For Goodman, this is a way of describing a non-human politics that emerges through the travel of bass modulations. 15 In an article on dub poetry in Canada, Phanuel Antwi similarly delineates the myriad temporal axes upon which dub works: “Dub poetry, in many ways, is an unfinished phenomenological history of moments of embodied blackness, a history of the present… . Every track ambushes you, confounds the process of pattern cognition by leaving the expected beat implied. By opening holes at the tightest moments of the groove, pulse falls through subtracted space, polyrhythm wrongfoots you, tugs and pushes at expectation, yanks the floorboards from underneath you” (71). 16 As noted earlier, Gumbs’s triptych also plays with riddims in ways that exceed a purely citational practice. Indeed, this scene of Phillis Wheatley-inspired composition carries on non-diegetically as well, repeated in a remixed form in M Archive. The next time we see an image of Wheatley, it is halfway through M Archive when, in a poem dedicated to “Phillis,” we are reminded of how “it was the crossing that stole from her her own lungs” (122). The image here is similar, but slightly altered, refashioned as it moves across Gumbs’s work. The passage in M Archive thus involves multiple forms of layering across temporal, spatial, and textual scales. 17 This idea of the limits of the body is further remixed in M Archive where Gumbs writes, “this thing about one body. it was the black feminist metaphysicians who first said it wouldn’t be enough. never had been enough. was not the actual scale of breathing” (6). Crucially in this passage, Gumbs even echoes the type of Anthropocenic scalar discourse that she critiques. 18 The possibility of sound as moving beyond human metrics is a riddim that continues to flow throughout the poem. For example, later in Dub the listening speaker asks: “is that the sound of outer space of reclaimed stars of supermassive holes the size of many suns… . the sound of reaching that cannot stop. is that the sound that makes the sky expand and everything get further apart like you from me across the place i cannot go” (140). Works Cited Antwi Phaneul. “Dub Poetry as Black Atlantic Body-Archive.” Small Axe 19 . 3 ( 2015 ): 65 – 83 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat Antwi Phanuel , Chariandy David . “Introduction: Writing Black Canadas .” Transitions 124 ( 2017 ): 31 – 37 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat Bennett Joshua. “‘Beyond the Vomiting Dark’: Toward a Black Hydropoetics.” Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field . Ed. Hume Angela and Osborne Gillian . U of Iowa P , 2018 : 102 – 17 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Best Stephen. None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life . Duke UP , 2018 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Bonneuil Christophe , Fressoz Jean-Baptiste . The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History, and Us . Trans. Fernbach David . Verso , 2017 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Chude-Sokei Louis. The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics . Wesleyan UP , 2015 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Clark Timothy. Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept . Bloomsbury , 2015 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC DeLoughrey Elizabeth M. Allegories of the Anthropocene . Duke UP , 2019 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Ellis Cristin. Antebellum Posthuman: Race and Materialism in the Mid-Nineteenth Century . Fordham UP , 2018 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Eshun Kodwo. More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction . Quartet Books , 1998 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Farrier David. Anthropocene Poetics: Deep Time, Sacrifice Zones, and Extinction . U of Minnesota P , 2019 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Frazier Chelsea. “Troubling Ecology: Wangechi Mutu, Octavia Butler, and Black Feminist Interventions in Environmentalism .” Critical Ethnic Studies 2 . 1 ( 2016 ): 40 – 72 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat Goodman Steven. Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear . MIT P , 2009 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Grusin Richard. “Introduction.” After Extinction . Ed. Grusin Richard . U of Minnesota P , 2018 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Gumbs Alexis Pauline. Dub: Finding Ceremony . Duke UP , 2020 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Gumbs Alexis Pauline. M Archive: After the End of the World . Duke UP , 2018 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Gumbs Alexis Pauline. Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity . Duke UP , 2016 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Hamilton Clive , et al. “Thinking the Anthropocene.” The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis: Rethinking Modernity in a New Epoch . Ed. Hamilton Clive , Bonneuil Christophe , Gemenne François . Routledge , 2015 . 1 – 14 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Hamilton Njelle. Phonographic Memories: Popular Music and the Contemporary Caribbean Novel . Rutgers UP , 2019 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Hartman Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America . Oxford UP , 1997 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Jackson Zakkiyah Iman. Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World . New York UP , 2020 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Jasen Paul. Low End Theory: Bass, Bodies, and the Materiality of Sonic Experience . Bloomsbury , 2016 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Karera Axelle. “Blackness and the Pitfalls of Anthropocene Ethics .” Critical Philosophy of Race 7 . 1 ( 2019 ): 32 – 56 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat Keeling Kara. Queer Times, Black Futures . New York UP , 2019 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC King Tiffany Lethabo. The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies . Duke UP , 2019 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Lewis Simon , Maslin Mark . “Defining the Anthropocene.” Nature 519 ( 2015 ): 171 – 80 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS PubMed WorldCat McKittrick Katherine. “Diachronic Loops/deadweight Tonnage/bad made Measure .” Cultural Geographies 23 . 1 ( 2015 ): 3 – 18 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat McKittrick Katherine , ed. Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis . Duke UP , 2015 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Moten Fred. Black and Blur . Duke UP , 2017 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Moten Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition . U of Minnesota P , 2003 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Outka Paul. Race and Nature: From Transcendentalsim to the Harlem Renaissance. Palgrave MacMillan , 2008 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Posmentier Sonya. Cultivation and Catastrophe: The Lyric Ecology of Modern Black Literature . Johns Hopkins UP , 2017 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Reed Anthony. Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing . Johns Hopkins UP , 2016 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Rifkin Mark. Fictions of Land: Blackness, Indigeneity, Speculation . Duke UP , 2019 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Roane J.T. , Hobsey Justin . “Mapping Black Ecologies .” Current Research in Digital History 2 ( 2019 ). Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Semaj-Hall Isis. “Constructing a Dub Identity: What it means to be ‘Back Home’ in Jamaica .” Cultural Dynamics 30 . 1–2 ( 2018 ): 96 – 108 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat Semaj-Hall Isis. “Re-Membering Our Caribbean Dub Aesthetic .” SX Salon 21 ( 2016 ). Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Sharpe Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being . Duke UP , 2016 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC “ Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity by Alexis Pauline (review) .” Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International 7 . 1 ( 2018 ): 65 . Crossref Search ADS WorldCat Spillers Hortense. Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture. Chicago University Press , 2003 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Spillers Hortense. “ Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book . Diacritics 17 . 2 ( 1987 ): 64 – 81 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat Taylor Matthew. Universes Without Us: Posthuman Cosmologies in American Literature . U of Minnesota P , 2013 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Vergès Francois. “Racial Capitalocene.” Futures of Black Radicalism . Ed. Johnson Gaye Theresa and Lubin Alex . Verso , 2017 . 160 – 80 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Walcott Rinaldo. Black Like Who? Insomniac Press , 2003 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Weheliye Alexander. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human . Duke UP , 2014 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Weheliye Alexander. Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Modernity . Duke UP , 2005 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Wynter Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Toward the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation – An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3 . 3 ( 2003 ): 257 – 337 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat Yusoff Kathryn. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None . U of Minnesota P , 2019 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Blackness after the End of the World: Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s Dub Ecologies
JF - ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
DO - 10.1093/isle/isaa174
DA - 2020-12-31
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/blackness-after-the-end-of-the-world-alexis-pauline-gumbs-s-dub-TEcc0Ym9j3
SP - 77
EP - 101
VL - 30
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -