Review of Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being Erin Tatz (bio) Kevin Quashie. Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021. 248 pp. $25.95 (pb). ISBN: 9781478014010. Writing from the imperative to imagine a Black world, Kevin Quashie offers readers of Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being an ethical and philosophical framework of 'being' which invests in the richness of phenomenological experience. Quashie locates manifestations of this 'being' within Black poetics, pointing readers towards an ethic of Black being that eludes the impositions of an antiblack world. Luxuriating in the works of Lucille Clifton, Gwendolyn Brooks, Reginald Shepherd, Toi Derricotte, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, and so many transcendent Black female/feminist writers, Quashie captures and theorizes upon the quality of Black being that is and is of a Black world––a world in which Blackness exists in totality. He elides the ontological jeopardy of being Black in an antiblack world by instead investing in the imaginative potentialities inherent in the inalienable fact that Black being is neither created nor encompassed by antiblackness. In other words, the paradigm of antiblackness rests on the axiomatic denial of (Black) humanity; meanwhile, as Quashie notes in his conclusion, "Black aliveness is. It is." (147).1 Thus Black being carries within itself the quiet but explosive ontological truth of Blackness as is, as if, and in totality. Quashie turns to aliveness––an ethic, a manner of being, and an orientation––as a means of accessing the rightness of the embodied knowledge of a Black 'one' within a Black world. The ethic of aliveness is of self-regard, epistemological abundance and ontological presence; in aliveness, the Black 'one' affirms her spatio-temporal and ontological immediacy and immanence––"I am here"––drawing upon this very aliveness to philosophize the terms of being, and of being human. Quashie's thinking is fluid and lyrical throughout; it extends fluently from his previous work, The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture (2017). The concepts borne in his former work flourish in Black Aliveness, along with what seems to be a luminous through-line in his thinking. Whereas his earlier work elaborated upon the idiom of 'quiet' to expand our thinking about Black subjectivity and inner life, this book does the imaginative work of expounding upon the ethical implications of what constitutes Black aliveness as it manifests in Black poems and essays. In either case, Quashie's work seeks out and cherishes the moments in which Black female/feminist thinkers have constructed what Hortense Spillers refers to as "a new semantic field/fold."2 In so doing, the texts that Quashie examines enact a praxis of becoming as surrender which defies the oversignification of Blackness.3 In this vein, Quashie expounds upon the radical potentialities of aliveness through its constitutive qualities: relationality and oneness. Quashie's first chapter opens with a note from literary theorist Barbara Christian to Audre Lorde: "Can I say again how alive your being alive makes me feel!?!" (15). [End Page 498] Christian's note exemplifies the way that the delicate complexities of aliveness belie its ordinariness; Christian's sentiment speaks to the constancy of being alive with an urgent expressiveness, relaying to its reader the peculiarity of the feeling of aliveness precisely through its universality. Aliveness is conjured, affirmed, and encountered by Christian, Lorde, and the reader in an instance of 'poiesis' for the speaker herself.4 Quashie's elegant unfurling of the relationality of aliveness offers several valuable points of intervention; foremost among them is his contribution to theories of encounter and intersubjectivity. His reading of aliveness indicates a capacity to leap past the barriers of intersubjective identification, instead operating upon an understanding of relationality as embodied totality and sociality. His aliveness is of the phenomenological current of capacious being, of surrender to the quiet volatility and potential obliteration of self. The relationality of aliveness attends to the anonymous and familiar, the personal and impersonal, through the substrate of one's material and immaterial experience of the world (as Lorde's erotic phenomenology suggests, from "within outward").5 Through this explication of relationality, Quashie centers the objectified 'other' in this formula as the...
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