Overview

In A Sense of Arrival, Kevin Adonis Browne blends literary, visual, and material forms to present a narrative of Caribbean blackness. Arguing that the story of Caribbeanness cannot be told through words alone, Browne interweaves essays, memoir, autotheory, and narrative verse with documentary photography, portraiture, Rorschach blots, and images of his own sculptures and art installations. Browne labels this multimodal approach and rhetorical form “Caribbean nonfiction,” and he uses it to conceptualize arrival as a theory of being. Arrival is practiced through forms of status, return, belonging, nomadism, self-exile, love, loss, presence, and haunting, each of which expresses the vast complexity and urgency of Caribbeanness. At the same time, arrival emphasizes and extends Caribbean ways of being, knowing, and doing. Throughout, Browne challenges readers to follow the archipelagic sensibilities of the Caribbean to look beyond black death and apprehend the inherent optimism and beauty of arrival. A singular meditation on the art and process of Caribbeanness, A Sense of Arrival is a statement on how the black Caribbean self comes to be.

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9781478030928

Table of Contents

Reviews

“Structured by a series of arrivals and becomings, A Sense of Arrival is formally challenging and inventive—a beautiful and welcome invitation to think what work nonfiction might do toward freedom and what it might be and require to work toward freedom. This book has much to offer; there is so much brilliance here. It will be an important addition to Caribbean thought and rhetoric, Caribbean studies, Black studies, cultural studies, photography and visual culture.” -- Christina Sharpe, author of * Ordinary Notes * “A Sense of Arrival is a brilliant, beautiful, and unorthodox contribution to Black studies debates and to the reconceptualization of Black Being more broadly. In contrast to current trends, Kevin Adonis Browne is radically optimistic in the face of Black death and nonbeing and works to convince the reader that there is Black thought before, during, and after Black nonbeing. Having asked the question of Blackness and Black subjectivity, Browne’s highly original and philosophical notion of arrival becomes the answer, moving the reader from mere identity or even subjectivity to the ontological question of the nature of being itself.” -- Michelle Ann Stephens, author of * Skin Acts: Race, Psychoanalysis, and the Black Male Performer *

Author Information

Kevin Adonis Browne is Associate Professor of Rhetoric at Syracuse University and author of Tropic Tendencies: Rhetoric, Popular Culture, and the Anglophone Caribbean and High Mas: Carnival and the Poetics of Caribbean Culture.

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