M Archive: After the End of the World - Hardcover

Gumbs, Alexis Pauline

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822370697 ISBN 13: 9780822370697

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2018

Synopsis

Following the innovative collection Spill, Alexis Pauline Gumbs's M Archive—the second book in a planned experimental triptych—is a series of poetic artifacts that speculatively documents the persistence of Black life following a worldwide cataclysm. Engaging with the work of the foundational Black feminist theorist M. Jacqui Alexander, and following the trajectory of Gumbs's acclaimed visionary fiction short story “Evidence,” M Archive is told from the perspective of a future researcher who uncovers evidence of the conditions of late capitalism, antiblackness, and environmental crisis while examining possibilities of being that exceed the human. By exploring how Black feminist theory is already after the end of the world, Gumbs reinscribes the possibilities and potentials of scholarship while demonstrating the impossibility of demarcating the lines between art, science, spirit, scholarship, and politics.

About this title

About the Author:

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a poet, independent scholar, and activist. She is the author of Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity, also published by Duke University Press; coeditor of Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines; and the founder and director of Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind, an educational program based in Durham, North Carolina.

Review:

"M Archive adds to and extends the critical work being done around breath, breathing, and blackness. And in so doing, it gives us a reason to breathe – independently and collectively – again."
  (Sasha Panaram New Black Man in Exile 2018-02-25)

"Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a literary treasure. M Archive, the second book in an innovative trilogy that began with Spill, is evidence of her brilliance." (Bitch 2018-03-01)

"Groundbreaking.... This is an impressive archive 'written in collaboration with the survivors' and the mythology that Gumbs develops from the artifacts of future black life and memory works to reveal an existence 'on the verge of regenerating the cells that would let us dream deep enough to remember.'” (Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) 2018-03-05)

"The end of the world is no joke! This text is clearly ambitious. More compendium than chronicle, the writing is poetic, dense, and often solemn with glimmers of dark wit." (Gabrielle Civil Full Stop 2018-07-12)

"Offers a set of necessary and stimulating interventions . . . A generous work that challenges dominant views that assume that ancestral speculative work has no place in feminist theory." (Chandra Frank Feminist Formations 2018-11-01)

About this edition

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0822370697
• ISBN 13: 9780822370697
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 248