Working Group: The Black Outdoors

Co-convened by J. Kameron Carter (Duke Divinity School) and Sarah Cervenak (UNC Greensboro), The Black Outdoors: Humanities Futures after Property and Possession seeks to interrogate the relation between race, sexuality, and juridical and theological ideas of self-possession, often evidenced by the couplet of land-ownership and self-regulation, a couplet predicated on settler colonialism and historically racist, sexist, homophobic and classist ideas of bodies fit for (self-)governance. The project title points up the ways blackness figures as always outside the state, unsettled, unhomed, and unmoored from sovereignty in its doubled-form of aggressively white discourses on legitimate citizenship on one hand and the public/private divide itself on the other. The project will address questions of the “black outdoors” in relationship to literary, legal, theological, philosophical, and artistic works, especially poetry and visual arts. * Image: Book cover detail from Ed Roberson, To See the Earth Before the End of the World.