Door of No Return

Michael E. Sawyer is Professor with Tenure of African American Literature & Culture, and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of Black Minded: The Political Philosophy of Malcolm X, An Africana Philosophy of Temporality: Homo Liminalis, and Sir Lewis.

"This work, stunning in its lucidity, develops the notion of a Black Aesthetic through an engagement with Toni Morrison, W.E.B. Du Bois, and a range of scholarly and popular forms of Black thought. Accepting the importance of Afropessimist insistence on the pervasive reality of anti-Blackness, Sawyer nevertheless finds the thresholds and liminal spaces that open up both imagination and a transformative futurity. Generous and attentive in his readings of a range of texts, songs, theories, and fictions, Sawyer opens a world and lets us think, perhaps for the first time, about what that world has been, is, and will be. Speculative, capacious, careful, compelling, and brilliant, The Door of No Return demonstrates a Black Aesthetic that creates paths and redraws the maps of space and world, as if for the first time."—Judith Butler, University of California, Berkeley"The Door of No Return is the Black radical expression that passes any form of an impasse and breaks any foreclosure to dwell in improvisation. It is in this sense that we must accept this offering as an invitation to listen differently, to congregate otherwise, to be out of/there. Michael Sawyer must be commended for gracing us with this performance of Black thought."—Tendayi Sithole, Professor in the Department of Political Sciences at the University of South Africa