Sentient Flesh: Thinking in Disorder Poiesis in Black (Black Outdoors: Innovations in the Poetics of Study)

About this book

In Sentient Flesh R. A. Judy takes up freedman Tom Windhams 1937 remark we should have our liberty cause . . . us is human flesh" as a point of departure for an extended meditation on questions of the human epistemology and the historical ways in which the black being is understood. Drawing on numerous fields from literary theory and musicology to political theory and phenomenology as well as Greek and Arabic philosophy Judy engages literary texts and performative practices such as music and dance that express knowledge and conceptions of humanity appositional to those grounding modern racialized capitalism. Operating as critiques of Western humanism these practices and modes of being-in-the-worldwhich he theorizes as thinking in disorder or poisis in blackforeground the irreducible concomitance of flesh thinking and personhood. As Judy demonstrates recognizing this concomitance is central to finding a way past the destructive force of ontology that still holds us in thrall. Erudite and capacious Sentient Flesh offers a major intervention in the black study of life.