Plant-Human: Ecological Alterity in Black Surrealist Poetics

Hosted by the Humanities Center and featuring faculty fellow, Joy Priest.

In her 1942 essay, “Malaise d’une civilisation” (“Malaise of a Civilization”), Suzanne Césaire introduces her counterhumanist concept of the “plant-human” as a surreal ontology of Black being. “Like a plant,” she writes, “he abandons himself to the rhythm of universal life. There is not the slightest effort to dominate nature.” Relatedly, in his book length poem, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (“Notebook of a Return to the Native Land”), her partner, the poet Aimé Césaire, employs a perspective of inseparable relation between the combined consciousness of the landscape and the speaker that effects a shared subjectivity in opposition to the romantic lyric’s singular I-voice. In a work-in-progress that combines critical writing and the personal essay, Joy Priest traces a lineage from the Césaires’ counterhumanist poetics to recent books by Black poets and memoirists. Along with shared subjectivity, Priest considers other methods of ecological alterity in the works of Aracelis Girmay, Sarah Broom, and MaKshya Tolbert.

Respondents include Senjuti Mukherjee from Film & Media Studies + Dr. Sonya Posmentier, Associate Professor of English, Director of Graduate Studies, NYU . This event will be hybrid, so you can attend it either in person in 602 CL or via Zoom as you prefer. Precirculated material for this colloquium will be available here about two prior to the event.