Abstract
What are the waters that break in the wake of the enslavement vessel? The waters which are waded? While at first these sorts of questions may strike us as primarily rhetorical, at best poetic, they are inquiries which animate Jonathan Howard’s Inhabitants of the Deep. He takes up the provocation of Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley in “Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic” to take seriously a “return to the materiality of water to make its metaphors mean more complexly” for Black scholarship (p. 26). As Howard puts it, “for all our talk of water, in other words, black studies has yet, in Tinsley’s estimation, to jump in. However well trodden, it appears black studies is yet to break the surface” (p. 26). Thus, Inhabitants of the Deep is an explication of that call to expand our metaphorical apprehension of water by jumping into what he calls “the deep,” a term pulled forth from early African diasporic encounter(s) with the ocean and oceanic. Both the title and central term of the work are pulled from Olaudah Equiano’s experience of watching enslaved Africans who either jumped or were thrown overboard in his narrative: “Often did I think many of the inhabitants of the deep much more happy than myself. I envied them the freedom they enjoyed, and as often wished I could change my condition for theirs” (p. 2).
Howard begins with and extends this meditation on what it means to “inhabit the deep” (p. 2). The term “the deep” is broad and meant to act “as a synonym for the ocean and a potential of all waters (and lands). . .[and] what blackness has known throughout the changing same of black life and death from the steps blinked on the face of the Atlantic to the ground we still struggle to stand upon” (p. 4). Thus, the scope of Howard’s text includes not only the Atlantic, but the conceptuality and framing of the ocean and oceanic itself. Inhabitants of the Deep is in conversation with the cultural historical framework of the Black Atlantic as conceptualized by Paul Gilroy, Linda Heywood and others, scholarship around Black geographies such as that done by Katherine McKittrick and J.T Roane, as well as the multi-disciplinary critical discourse around the anthropocene, the geological epoch defined by extensive human impact on global environmental systems. Specifically, Howard’s work is an intervention into Black ecocriticism, an interdisciplinary field centered on examining and critiquing the interrelated historical, socio-cultural and political relationships between Black people, and historically eurocentric and colonial, contemporarily global capitalist, conceptions of nature and the environment. This is a double-edged sword for the work, as the scope proffered by the deep as a conceptual frame is potentially very generative whilst as an object of analysis it is primed to be broad and unwieldy.
Inhabitants of the Deep pushes its aim to extend our metaphorical sense of the depth of water and the theoretical implications of this extension for our understanding of African diasporic cultural practice through six chapters. Drawing from a range of interdisciplinary fields — literary studies, music/sonic studies, visual studies and performance studies — Howard’s method is an attempt to approach its object – the deep – with a fidelity to its defining immensity, slipperiness, and irrepressibility. Each chapter takes on a different set of interdisciplinary objects, and reads them through the lens of the deep.
Chapter one reads across the autobiographies of Equiano and Frederick Douglas and their encounters with the deep to offer critiques of the euro- and terrestrially-centric understandings of the land, the world and the human read in the pronouncements of Jean Jacques Rosseau, Henry David Thoreau, and Arnold Guyot. In chapter two, Howard extends the prior critiques of eurocentric notions of subjectivity and land to our understanding of the environment and environmentalism. In specific, Howard offers an expansive way to theoretically approach and reimagine the oceanic, whilst critiquing what he calls (via the work of Lawrence Buell and Jeffery Cohen) the terrestrial and “green” bias of our concepts of nature - or, a bias which overemphasizes land, and deploys the color green as metonymic for a romantic, utopian idealization of nature. With chapter three, Howard turns to sound and music as the structuring metaphor and extended readings of the poetry of Ed Roberson, M. NourbeSe Phillip’s Zong! and the analysis of Black spirituals proffered by Frederick Douglass and Du Bois to survey the ways Black scholars - with special attention given to francophone scholars Fanon and Edouard Glissant - have thought through the historical and subjective disenfranchisement enabled by the Middle Passage. Chapter four is an extended reading of Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow to illustrate how the deep has been taken up as a space of African diasporic imagination deeply imbricated with grief, mourning and memories of displacement. Following this, chapter five turns to how the deep, and memory of its inhabitants, enable alternative visions and performances of Black life through a close reading of the August Wilson play Gem of the Ocean. For Howard, the texts which center chapters four and five act as the literary enactment of the critiques of eurocentrism he traces in chapter three, with reading them through the lens of the deep broadening our understanding of “the black culture that takes shape in the wake of Middle Passage and [how] its profound oceanic encounter alternatively harbors a sense of the planet as an ecological unity” (p. 191). Concluding with chapter six, Howard brings to bear the conclusions of the prior chapters on our contemporary moment via visual analysis, namely through engagement with the underwater sculpture of Jason deCaires Taylor in “Vicissitudes,” the photography of Emmett Till, the violent repression of Civil Rights-era protestors and refugees of Katrina. What is at stake for Howard with this text and his attention to the deep and its inhabitants is not simply an intellectual exercise, but an ethnical necessity both in view of the historical injustice of the Transatlantic enslavement trade and in acknowledging our current environmental crisis. As he writes, “I risk trying to bear witness to the inhabitants of the deep because I’ve discovered it to be a matter of both ethical and existential necessity. It’s not only our care for the dead in the violence of their invisibilization. We also need to see them if we are to earnestly see ourselves” (p. 200).
Thus, Inhabitants of the Deep tries to cast a wide net to make its catch. The upside of this approach is that Howard offers a generous way to theoretically approach and reimagine the oceanic. On the other hand and more ambiguously, however, such a wide ranged approach and broad scope often leaves more questions than answers, and leaves gaps for more specialized research and inquiry in the future. For instance, while Inhabitants makes a convincing case for a rethinking of the aforementioned terrestrial and green biases within eurocentric notions of man and his relationship to the land/world, the text’s opening definition of the deep as including “the ocean and a potential of all waters (and lands)” feels too broad without sufficient justification beyond as an extension of the (necessary) critique of the aforementioned eurocentric biases.
Howard’s writing is often poetic, and the text is peppered with literary, theologic and musical references throughout which make it feel accessible as a theoretical text. As with any interesting poetry, however, this also leaves opening for uncertainty, and there are moments where one is left unsure about what Howard wishes to impart to readers. A good example of the ambiguity of this approach is in the fourth chapter of the study, “Deep Imagination.” While Howard’s analysis of the work showcases his strength as a literary scholar, Paule Marshall’s novel Praisesong’s characterizations deep hangs on the periphery of the chapter. Howard spends the majority of the analysis focused on characterizations of Avey, Aunt Cuney and the intricacies of intimacy and historical possession within Black esthetics through the story of the Ibos who alternatively “flew away” or “walked back to Africa” (p. 148). This section culminating in one of the book’s more notable claims, that Howard calls (via Gaston Bachelard) “the material imagination of blackness is a development historically rooted in the bewildering encounter of middle passing Africans with the deep” (p.165; my emphasis added). Despite the force of that claim, however, the deep is not essential to his claims about memory and meaning-making that he reads interpersonally in Praisesong.
Jonathan Howard’s Inhabitants of the Deep is an incredibly ambitious book, and despite some theoretical and methodological limitations, it nonetheless offers expansive new avenues for inquiry not only in Black Studies, but across the increasingly more environmentally-conscious humanities. Those interested in Black ecocriticism may find the text beneficial, as it is most pointedly an intervention in the metaphoric and theoretical framing of that field. However, as the study has such a wide scope, potential readers interested in Black cultural, literary, sonic or performance studies might also find Inhabitants of the Deep generative. While not necessarily accessible to undergraduates, this text could be of benefit to graduate students, faculty members or independent researchers wishing to get a deeper dive into the theoretical content offered by the text. And while not all of the provocations Howard offers here throw us entirely past the shores, this work is nonetheless a siren call to pull us out even further into the deep.
