![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 See: Raymond Zong, “For Planet Earth, This Might Be the Start of a New Age,” NYT, December 17, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/17/climate/anthropocene-age-geology.html.
2 Alexis Pauline Gumbs, M Archive: After the End of the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 48, 90.
3 Ibid., 61,129.
4 Ibid., xi.
5 Chelsea M. Frazier, “Troubling Ecology: Wangechi Mutu, Octavia Butler, and Black Feminist Interventions in Environmentalism,” Critical Ethnic Studies 2, no. 1 (2016): 40–72; Tiffany Lethabo King, Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019); Romy Opperman, “The Need for a Black Feminist Climate Justice: A Case of Haunting Ecology and Eco-Deconstruction,” CR: The New Centennial Review, 22, no. 1 (2022): 59–93; Danielle Purifoy and Louise Seamster, “What Is Environmental Racism For? Place-Based Harm and Relational Development,” Environmental Sociology 7, no. 2 (2021) 110–21; J.T. Roane, “Plotting the Black Commons,” Souls 20, no. 3 (2018): 239–66; Kathryn Yusoff, One Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2019).
6 M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 190.
7 See Opperman, “The Need for a Black Feminist Climate Justice,” 61. Along with Gumbs' text, L.H. Stallings asserts this Black lesbian genealogical of eco-ethics in her “Dirt Manifesto” and “Geophukit Manifesto.” See L.H. Stallings, A Dirty South Manifesto: Sexual Resistance and Imagination in the New South. (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2020): 41–97.
8 See Shouhei Tanaka, “Black Feminist Geohaptics and the Broken Earth,” American Literature 95, no. 3 (2023): 569–96.
9 Barbara Smith, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” The Radical Teacher No. 7 (March 1978), 27.
10 Marquis Bey, Black Trans Feminism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022), 116; Treva Ellison, K. Marshall Green, Matt Richardson, and C. Riley Snorton, “We Got Issues: Toward a Black Trans*/Studies.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 4, no. 2 (2017): 162–9.
11 Sylvia Wynter, “The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism,” boundary 2, Vol. 12 no. 3– Vol. 13. no. 1 (1984): 19–70; Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/ Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation—an Argument” CR: The New Centennial Review, 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337.
12 Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 21.
13 Gumbs, M Archive, 49.
14 “Poetics, Revelations, and Catastrophes: An Interview with Kamau Brathwaite,” Rain Taxi Review Online edition, Fall 2005, www.raintaxi.com/poetics-revelations-and-catastrophes-an-interview-with-kamau-brathwaite/ (accessed April 13, 2023).
15 This approach to relationality is of course informed by Edouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation, but in the scope of this inquiry Alexander is my origin point for considering how Black lesbianism mobilizes a particular form of ecological ethics.
16 Think the 2007 apocalypse film I Am Legend’s star Will Smith as an archetypal lone survivor, in Black. See I Am Legend, directed by Francis Lawrence (2007; Burbank, CA, Warner Bros. Pictures, 2008), DVD.
17 Denise Ferreira DaSilva, “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics: The Quest(ion) of Blackness Toward the End of the World,” The Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (2014): 82.
18 Wynter describes this process as the “lawlike manner through the systemic stigmatization of the Earth in terms of its being made of a ‘vile and base matter,’ occurred in early colonial correspondence around the geographies of the New World, alongside European’s documentation of Africans on the Continent and stolen to North American in the same terms: “Unsettling,” 267.
19 Da Silva, “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics”, 91–2.
20 Gumbs, M Archive, 61.
21 For more on breath and breathing in Gumbs’ practice, see Cathy Thomas, “Reverberations of the Black Feminist Breathing Chorus: An Interview with Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Sangodare,” Resonance 2, no. 2 (2021): 281–95.
22 Gumbs, M Archive, xi.
23 Ibid., 179.
24 Frazier, “Troubling Ecology”, 40.
25 Alexander, Pedagogies, 258.
26 Ibid., 295.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid., 329.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid., 9.
31 Gumbs, M Archive, 6.
32 “We Are Always Crossing: Alexis Pauline Gumbs by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore,” BOMB Magazine, March 22, 2018, https://bombmagazine.org/articles/alexis-pauline-gumbs/ (accessed April 13, 2023).
33 The daily practice of writing in open response to Pedagogies also echoes another of Gumbs’ ritualized heuristic practices of the “Oracle”: https://cla.umn.edu/gwss/story/oracles-Black-feminism (accessed February 28, 2024).
34 Gumbs, M Archive, 179.
35 Aimé Césaire, “Poetry and Knowledge,” Lyric and Dramatic Poetry, 1946-82. Translated by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith. (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1990), 2; Wynter “Unsettling,” 331. Michelle Wright describes a “physics of Blackness” as way to conceive of blackness “epiphenomenally,” meaning that its forms and meanings are determined in the “now,” and through an always-interpreted respect to past, present and future (as opposed to linearity): Michelle M. Wright, Physics of Blackness: Beyond Middle Passage Epistemology (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 4. Zakiyyah Iman Jackson has similarly turned to physics metaphors in Black gender and feminist theory as a means frame Black femininity as “a place in space that conditions standpoint. Its figuration is a matter of history and proximity”: Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, “‘Theorizing in a Void’: Sublimity, Matter, and Physics in Black Feminist Poetics,” SAQ 117, no. 3 (2018), 630.
36 Césaire, “Poetry and Knowledge,” 2.
37 Axelle Karega, “Blackness and the Pitfalls of Anthropocene Ethics,” Critical Philosophy of Race 7, no. 1 (2019), 33.
38 Dionne Brand lecture, “The Shape of Language,” presented June 18, 2018 at the Graham Foundation, as quoted in “Between the Covers, Interview with David Naimon and Dionne Brand,” https://tinhouse.com/transcript/between-the-covers-dionne-brand-interview/ (accessed November 17, 2023).
39 Walidah Imarisha, “Introduction,” in Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements, ed. Walidah Imarisha and, adrienne maree brown (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2015), 3.
40 “Resistance Writers: An Interview with Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Words By Thomas Chisholm and Alexis Pauline Gumbs,” https://frictionlit.org/resistance-writers-an-interview-with-alexis-pauline-gumbs/ (accessed April 13, 2023).
41 Kriti Sharma, Interdependence: Biology and Beyond (New York, NY: Fordham Press, 2015), 2; Combahee River Collective Statement, 1977.
42 Gumbs, M Archive, 12.
43 Smith, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” 20.
44 Ibid., 23.
45 Gumbs, M Archive, 60.
46 Tina Campt, Listening to Images (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 17.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Olivia R. Polk
Olivia R. Polk is a Black dyke, and PhD candidate in American Studies, African American Studies, and WGSS at Yale University. From 2023 to 2025 she is a fellow in residence at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. Her other work appears in Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, and Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal.