Joshua Bennett – författare

Minor Notes Vol. 1 features the work of three poets. Published in 1837, Poems by a Slave is one of the lesser-known works by George Moses Horton (1798-1883), once popularly known as the 'black bard of North Carolina.' Visions of the Dusk (1915) is an American prose poem known for its formal innovation by Fenton Johnson, a poet, essayist, editor and educator from Chicago. Georgia Douglas Johnson was the most widely read black woman poet in the US during the first three decades of the 20th century. Bronze: A Book of Verse (1922) was introduced with a foreword by W. E. B. Du Bois.

Joshua Bennett and Jesse McCarthy repeatedly found themselves struck by the number ofexciting poets they came across in long-out-of-print collections and forgotten journals whose work has been neglected or entirely ignored, even by scholars of Black poetry. Minor Notes is an excavation initiative that recovers and curates archival materials from these understudied, though supremely gifted, African American poets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and aims to bridge scholarly interest with the growing general audience who reads, writes, and circulates poetry within that tradition. As Minor Notes clarifies, the work of contemporary Black poets is perhaps best understood through the lens of a long-standing tradition of the poet as witness, as prophetic voice, as communal bard, and as scholar of the everyday and the miraculous.The central theme of this volume is an archival exploration of young people’s poetry within the Black expressive tradition.

Exploring the rich relationship between historical thought and religious debate in Victorian culture, God and Progress offers a unique and authoritative account of intellectual change in nineteenth-century Britain. The volume recovers a twofold process in which the growth of progressive ideas of history transformed British Protestant traditions, as religious debate, in turn, profoundly shaped Victorian ideas of history. It adopts a remarkably wide contextual perspective, embracing believers and unbelievers, Anglicans and nonconformists, and writers from different parts of the British Isles, fully situating British debates in relation to their European and especially German Idealist surroundings. The Victorian intellectual mainstream came to terms with religious diversity, changing ethical sensibilities, and new kinds of knowledge by encouraging providential, spiritualized, and developmental understandings of human time. A secular counter-culture simultaneously disturbed this complex consensus, grounding progress in appeals to scientific advances and the retreat of metaphysics. God and Progress thus explores the ways in which divisions within British liberalism were fundamentally related to differences over the past, present, and future of religion. It also demonstrates that religious debate powered the process by which historicism acquired cultural authority in Victorian national life, and later began to lose it. The study reconstructs the ways in which theological dynamics, often relegated to the margins of nineteenth-century British intellectual history, effectively forged its leading patterns.

Whiting award-winning poet and Distinguished Chair of Humanities at MIT, Dr. Joshua Bennett creates a masterful synthesis of personal narrative and history that illuminates the promises and perils of being labelled a Black prodigy.The outside world's perception of Black promise comes and goes. It does so in ways that are undeniably advantageous for Black children. Yet here, Dr. Bennett explores the rarely examined pitfalls of being a Black prodigy in a society that has, too often, defined Blackness as the very absence of intellect. Bennett probes what it means to be othered, even if this othering is the same key to an individual's success in an unfair world, demanding that we build alternative futures that make space for the promise and hope of every child.In The People Can Fly Bennet shares his own academic journey-including spoken word performances at The White House and Sundance Film Festival, an NAACP Image Award, and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship-mirrors the ebb and flow between being deemed promising and "a problem." He bolsters this personal narrative by observing how disability within his own family complicates societies perception of genius, and by diving into the under-examined history of young intellectuals like Oscar Moore, Thomas Wiggins, Stephen Wiltshire, and others. Together, Bennett lays out an arresting portrait of a world that obscures genius behind a disorienting facade of otherness and exceptionality.With arresting prose and grace, The People Can Fly is an eye-opening reflection on what it means to be labelled gifted in today's world; and a personal history and love letter to all the Black prodigies who have disturbed the veil of racism, and the children who will continue to do so.

One of the most influential works of literature during the abolitionist movement of the early nineteenth century, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass recounts with powerful eloquence and detail the author’s life as a slave and his eventual escape to the North. This Norton Library edition features the original 1845 text and explanatory endnotes that clarify obscure terms and references. An introduction by Joshua Bennett provides historical background, highlights some of the narrative’s key themes, and assesses the enduring legacy of Frederick Douglass’s vital work.

Winner of the William Sanders Scarborough Prize“This trenchant work of literary criticism examines the complex ways…African American authors have written about animals. In Bennett’s analysis, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Jesmyn Ward, and others subvert the racist comparisons that have ‘been used against them as a tool of derision and denigration.’...An intense and illuminating reevaluation of black literature and Western thought.” —Ron Charles, Washington PostFor much of American history, Black people have been conceived and legally defined as nonpersons, a subgenre of the human. In Being Property Once Myself, prize-winning poet Joshua Bennett shows that Blackness has long acted as the caesura between human and nonhuman and delves into the literary imagination and ethical concerns that have emerged from this experience. Each chapter tracks a specific animal—the rat, the cock, the mule, the dog, the shark—in the works of Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Jesmyn Ward, and Robert Hayden. The plantation, the wilderness, the kitchenette overrun with pests, the valuation and sale of animals and enslaved people—all place Black and animal life in fraught proximity.Bennett suggests that animals are deployed to assert a theory of Black sociality and to combat dominant claims about the limits of personhood. And he turns to the Black radical tradition to challenge the pervasiveness of anti-Blackness in discourses surrounding the environment and animals. Being Property Once Myself is an incisive work of literary criticism and a groundbreaking articulation of undertheorized notions of dehumanization and the Anthropocene.“A gripping work…Bennett’s lyrical lilt in his sharp analyses makes for a thorough yet accessible read.” —LSE Review of Books“These absorbing, deeply moving pages bring to life a newly reclaimed ethics.”—Colin Dayan, author of The Law Is a White Dog“Tremendously illuminating…Refreshing and field-defining.”—Salamishah Tillet, author of Sites of Slavery

Winner of the William Sanders Scarborough PrizeA prizewinning poet argues that Blackness acts as the caesura between human and nonhuman, man and animal.Throughout US history, Black people have been configured as sociolegal nonpersons, a subgenre of the human. Being Property Once Myself delves into the literary imagination and ethical concerns that have emerged from this experience. Each chapter tracks a specific animal figure—the rat, the cock, the mule, the dog, and the shark—in the works of Black authors such as Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Jesmyn Ward, and Robert Hayden. The plantation, the wilderness, the kitchenette overrun with pests, the simultaneous valuation and sale of animals and enslaved people—all are sites made unforgettable by literature in which we find Black and animal life in fraught proximity.Joshua Bennett argues that animal figures are deployed in these texts to assert a theory of Black sociality and to combat dominant claims about the limits of personhood. Bennett also turns to the Black radical tradition to challenge the pervasiveness of anti-Blackness in discourses surrounding the environment and animals. Being Property Once Myself is an incisive work of literary criticism and a close reading of undertheorized notions of dehumanization and the Anthropocene.

**Winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize****Longlisted for the Griffin Prize and the Massachusetts Book Award****Soon to be adapted for screen by Lena Waithe and Warner Bros.**An award-winning collection and novella exploring the realm of speculative fiction, while addressing issues as varied as abolition, Black ecological consciousness, and the boundless promise of parenthoodAcross three sequences, Joshua Bennett’s new book recalls and reimagines social worlds almost but not entirely lost, all while gesturing toward the ones we are building even now, in the midst of a state of emergency, together. Bennett opens with a set of autobiographical poems that deal with themes of family, life, death, vulnerability, and the joys and dreams of youth. The central section, “The Book of Mycah,” features an alternate history where Malcolm X is resurrected from the dead, as is a young black man shot by the police some fifty years later in Brooklyn. The final section of The Study of Human Life are poems that Bennett has written about fatherhood, on the heels of his own first child being born.Praise for Joshua Bennett‘One of the brightest intellectual and political thinkers of a new generation’ Jesse McCarthy‘Bennett conjures a spirit of kinship that, illuminated by redolent imagery, borders on mythic’ New Yorker‘Joshua Bennett’s astounding, dolorous, rejoicing voice is indispensable’ Tracy K Smith

From a 2021 Whiting Award and Guggenheim Fellow recipient, a 'rhapsodic, rigorous poetry collection, which pays homage to everyday Black experience in the US' (New Yorker)Selected as a book of the year by the Telegraph_______________________________Owed is a book with celebration at its centre. Its primary concern is how we might mend the relationship between ourselves and the people, spaces, and objects we have been taught to think of as insignificant, as fundamentally unworthy of study, reflection, attention, or care. Spanning the spectrum of genre and form - from elegy and ode to origin myth--these poems elaborate an aesthetics of repair. What's more, they ask that we turn to the songs and sites of the historically denigrated so that we might uncover a new way of being in the world together, one wherein we can truthfully reckon with the brutality of the past and thus imagine the possibilities of our shared, unpredictable present, anew.