Wilson Kwamogi Okello is Assistant Professor of Education at the Pennsylvania State University.

"There are books that leave you feeling inspired, challenged, and wanting more. Okello's On Blackness, Liveliness, and What It Means to Be Human does that and more. As powerful as it is beautiful, the book deftly brings the reader on a journey through genres and masterfully weaves across disciplines. By centering Black Study and issuing a call to study 'liveliness,' Okello makes a profound and welcomed intervention, modeling an 'otherwise' that will forever change this thing we call student development theory." — Keon McGuire, North Carolina State University

• Introduction: Preliminary Vocabulary toward Black SpecificityPart I: On What It Means to Be Human 1. Loving Black Flesh in Higher Education2. Breathing, Being, and Human Development3. "Look a Negro!" Explicating Self-DefinitionPart II: Black Ontological Possibility: The Praxes of Self-Definition 4. Invention: Narrating the Impossibility of Black Ontology5. Toward an Ontology of Black Intimacy6. Presence: Black Ontology as Image-Making and Imagination amid the "Uninhabitable"7. "Make it intact": Toward Ethical Regard in Higher EducationPart III: Carcerality and the Radical Imagination of Self-Definition 8. On the Possibility of Black Thought to Guide Educational Policy and Practice9. "I can't be a pessimist": Carcerality, Black Study, and Staging Black FuturesGratitudeNotesReferencesIndex

Wilson Kwamogi Okello is Assistant Professor of Education at the Pennsylvania State University.

"There are books that leave you feeling inspired, challenged, and wanting more. Okello's On Blackness, Liveliness, and What It Means to Be Human does that and more. As powerful as it is beautiful, the book deftly brings the reader on a journey through genres and masterfully weaves across disciplines. By centering Black Study and issuing a call to study 'liveliness,' Okello makes a profound and welcomed intervention, modeling an 'otherwise' that will forever change this thing we call student development theory." — Keon McGuire, North Carolina State University

• Introduction: Preliminary Vocabulary toward Black SpecificityPart I: On What It Means to Be Human 1. Loving Black Flesh in Higher Education2. Breathing, Being, and Human Development3. "Look a Negro!" Explicating Self-DefinitionPart II: Black Ontological Possibility: The Praxes of Self-Definition 4. Invention: Narrating the Impossibility of Black Ontology5. Toward an Ontology of Black Intimacy6. Presence: Black Ontology as Image-Making and Imagination amid the "Uninhabitable"7. "Make it intact": Toward Ethical Regard in Higher EducationPart III: Carcerality and the Radical Imagination of Self-Definition 8. On the Possibility of Black Thought to Guide Educational Policy and Practice9. "I can't be a pessimist": Carcerality, Black Study, and Staging Black FuturesGratitudeNotesReferencesIndex

Wilson Kwamogi Okello is Assistant Professor of Education at the Pennsylvania State University.

"There are books that leave you feeling inspired, challenged, and wanting more. Okello's On Blackness, Liveliness, and What It Means to Be Human does that and more. As powerful as it is beautiful, the book deftly brings the reader on a journey through genres and masterfully weaves across disciplines. By centering Black Study and issuing a call to study 'liveliness,' Okello makes a profound and welcomed intervention, modeling an 'otherwise' that will forever change this thing we call student development theory." — Keon McGuire, North Carolina State University

• Introduction: Preliminary Vocabulary toward Black SpecificityPart I: On What It Means to Be Human 1. Loving Black Flesh in Higher Education2. Breathing, Being, and Human Development3. "Look a Negro!" Explicating Self-DefinitionPart II: Black Ontological Possibility: The Praxes of Self-Definition 4. Invention: Narrating the Impossibility of Black Ontology5. Toward an Ontology of Black Intimacy6. Presence: Black Ontology as Image-Making and Imagination amid the "Uninhabitable"7. "Make it intact": Toward Ethical Regard in Higher EducationPart III: Carcerality and the Radical Imagination of Self-Definition 8. On the Possibility of Black Thought to Guide Educational Policy and Practice9. "I can't be a pessimist": Carcerality, Black Study, and Staging Black FuturesGratitudeNotesReferencesIndex