Synopses & Reviews
Combining black feminist theory, philosophy, and performance studies, Sarah Jane Cervenak ruminates on the significance of physical and mental roaming for black freedom. She is particularly interested in the power of wandering or daydreaming for those whose mobility has been under severe constraint, from the slave era to the present. Since the Enlightenment, wandering has been considered dangerous and even criminal when associated with people of color. Cervenak engages artist-philosophers who focus on wayward movement and daydreaming, or mental travel, that transcend state-imposed limitations on physical, geographic movement. From Sojourner Truthand#39;s spiritual and physical roaming to the rambling protagonist of Gayl Jonesand#39;s novel
Mosquito, Cervenak highlights modes of wandering that subvert Enlightenment-based protocols of rationality, composure, and upstanding comportment. Turning to the artists Pope.L (William Pope.L), Adrian Piper, and Carrie Mae Weems, Cervenak argues that their work produces an otherworldly movement, an errant kinesis that exceeds locomotive constraints, resisting the straightening-out processes of post-Enlightenment, white-supremacist, capitalist, sexist, and heteronormative modernity. Their roaming animates another terrain, one where free, black movement is not necessarily connected to that which can be seen, touched, known, and materially valued.
Review
andquot;The rigorous turns and supple overturnings in Wandering illuminate and extend meditative resistance to the racial and sexual pathologization of the irregular, antiregulative, social, and aesthetic movement animating the history of black thought. Sarah Jane Cervenakand#39;s devoted study of the disruption of linearity, from David Walker to Gayl Jones, from Harriet Jacobs to William Pope.L challenges and allows us to understand that the errand of blackness is a wandering whose origin and end are dislocation, where the new thing awaits.andquot;
Review
andquot;Thereandrsquo;s much to admire in
Wandering. Sarah Jane Cervenak powerfully speaks to the value of daydreaming as a space of unrestricted movement. Her attention to temporality, to the sonic, and to gesture produces powerful new insights that will make this an important text for philosophy, Black Studies, performance studies, queer studies, and African American studies.andquot;
Review
andldquo;Cervenakand#39;s Wandering questions the very essence of wandering instead of simply adding a new magnitude to it.andrdquo;and#160;
Synopsis
Ruminating on the significance of physical and mental roaming in relation to black freedom, Sarah Jane Cervenak emphasizes the power of wandering and daydreaming for those whose mobility is severely constrained. From Sojourner Truthand#39;s spiritual and physical journeys to the rambling protagonist of Gayl Jonesand#39;s novel
Mosquito, Cervenak highlights modes of wandering that subvert Enlightenment-based protocols of rationality, composure, and upstanding comportment.
About the Author
Sarah Jane Cervenak is Assistant Professor of Womenand#39;s and Gender Studies and African American Studies at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1. Losing Their Heads: Race, Sexuality, and the Perverse Moves of the European Enlightenment 24
2. Crooked Ways and Weak Pens: The Enactment of Enlightenment against Slavery 59
3. Writing under a Spell: Adrienne Kennedyand#39;s Theater 95
4. andquot;I Am an African American Novelandquot;: Wandering as Noncompliance in Gayl Jonesand#39;s Mosquito 122
Conclusion. andquot;Before I Was Straightened Outandquot; 145
Notes 173
Bibliography 197
Index 209