High under the pew: A critical meditation on Joseph Winters’s Hope Draped in Black

Abstract

“High Under the Pew: A Critical Meditation on Joseph Winters’s Hope Draped in Black” thinks Joseph Winters’s text in relation to critical poetics, Black studies and Black feminist thought. In particular, I trace how Winters’s philosophical engagement with the concept of “melancholic hope” in Black literary production extends these above-named intellectual traditions’ critiques of the post-enlightenment subject. More precisely, Winters dwelling with “melancholic hope” as it manifests in Black aesthetic and political thought attends to modes of being inassimilable to racist, heteronormative, ableist and capitalist narratives of space-time and progress.