Join us in celebrating the release of JJJJerome Ellis' The Clearing with a reading list of 10 titles that inspired Ellis's work!
The titles included in this featured shelf address disability, poetics, music, and Blackness from the perspective of critical theory, historical writing, poetry that painfully explores the horrors of chattel slavery, and hymns. This reading list traces some of Ellis' poetic, musical, and intellectual lineage, taking us from the 11th century to the present day.
Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility
Ashon T. Crawley
Fordham University Press, 2016
In the Wake: On Blackness and Being
Christina Sharpe
Duke University Press, 2016
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Harriet Jacobs
Dover Publications, 2001 [1861]
Disability Rhetoric
Jay Timothy Dolmage
Syracuse University Press, 2014
Zong!
M. NourbeSe Philip
Wesleyan University Press, 2011
The Liber Ymnorum of Notker Balbulus
Notker Balbulus and Calvin M. Bower (ed.)
Henry Bradshaw Society, 2011 [11th century]
Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America
Sadiya Hartman
Oxford University Press, 2011 [1997]
The Nonconformist's Memorial
Susan Howe
New Directions, 1993
Black Madness :: Mad Blackness
Therí Alyce Pickens
Duke University Press, 2019
Additional Texts
Joshua St. Pierre, "Distending Straight-Masculine Time: A Phenomenology of the Disabled Speaking Body," in Hypathia 30, no. 1, Special Issue: New Conversations in Feminist Disability Studies (Winter 2015): 49-65.