M Archive bookcover

M Archive

After the End of the World
4.9/5.0
21,000+ Reviews
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Description

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.

Product Details

PublisherDuke University Press
Publish DateMarch 09, 2018
Pages248
LanguageEnglish
TypeBook iconPaperback / softback
EAN/UPC9780822370840
Dimensions8.4 X 5.5 X 0.6 inches | 0.7 pounds

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.

Reviews

"This is the second collection of a triptych that breaks so many molds in form, language, and perspectives. Alexis Pauline Gumbs ponders the landscape in a post-apocalyptic world, particularly for Black people that face environmental racism and dying capitalism. In the context of embodying Black feminist theory, the poems point to race, politics, feminism, healing, and the environment. It is a fresh approach to understanding the many nuances of environmentalism."--Dorsía Smith Silva "Literary Hub" (11/15/2024 12:00:00 AM)
"The prose poetry collection M Archive is a rich exploration of the elements, and of Black artistry lovingly and bodily engaged with dirt, sky, ocean, and fire in a post-apocalyptic world of new and old relations. It's a book full of insights and offerings for living more consciously, for creating healing spaces in a changing world."--Petra Kuppers "Shelf Awareness" (4/3/2024 12:00:00 AM)
"[G]round-breaking. . . . Gumbs's trilogy embraces the lyric beauty in the acts of naming, remembering, and finding one's way back to the source. . . . Reading Gumbs's books feels like reading an archive that will someday, who knows maybe even someday soon, usher in an era of radical transformation."--Kathryn Nuernberger "West Branch" (2/16/2021 12:00:00 AM)
(Starred Review) "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" (3/5/2018 12:00:00 AM)
"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" (3/1/2018 12:00:00 AM)
"At turns lush and awesome, in ways that make the eyes gleam and the mind crackle with electricity, in ways that devastate and leave the spirit raw with overlain feelings of complicity and responsibility, and loving, always loving, always loving in, between, and across every single word--the beautiful and daring writing of M Archive imperatively continues the constellar work of radical Black feminism's ongoing project of 'imagining the unimaginable.'"--John Murillo III "Make" (6/17/2020 12:00:00 AM)
"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)" (2/25/2018 12:00:00 AM)
"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" (11/1/2018 12:00:00 AM)
"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" (7/12/2018 12:00:00 AM)

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