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More Than an Ocean

Reflections of a Diasporic Daughter

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More Than an Ocean was awarded a publishing subvention grant from the Tara Coyt Publishing Fund

Book

Pages: 344

Illustrations: 12 illustrations

Release Date: March 30, 2027

Author: Alexis Pauline Gumbs

More Than an Ocean brings together over two decades of thoughtful, experimental writings in Black feminist diasporic practice by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. These essays, letters, poems, and meditations question the terms of Black diaspora across geography and generations. The collected works range from some of her earliest critical engagements with the scholars who have shaped her inquiry since graduate school, including Dionne Brand and Audre Lorde, to her most recent critical writings, to letters she’s exchanged with Christina Sharpe, Torkwase Dyson, and others. In all stages, Gumbs challenges traditional tenets of Black Studies, centering the Caribbean as a nodal point of the Black diaspora and placing Black women at the center of intellectual history, artistic communities, and political movements. By transversing form and discipline, More Than an Ocean paints an image not only of a Black queer feminist thinker but of what is possible in the work of inquiry and solidarity across differences and intimacies.

Praise

“More Than an Ocean is an exhilarating demonstration of reading and writing as acts of love capable of ministering forward and backward through time. Alexis Pauline Gumbs is one of the most beautiful minds—and most fearlessly compassionate hearts—of our time.” - Tracy K. Smith, author of Such Color: New and Selected Poems

“More than an Ocean is as vast and scopic as the geographies of Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Global connections, borne of her people's many journeys make her a fitting channeler of so many energies, histories, experiences, all through her own creative lens. Each of the books of this prolific talented, gifted writer furthers our engagement with and knowledge of our multiple and complex lived realities.” - Carole Boyce Davies, author of Black Women's Rights. Leadership and the Circularities of Power

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Information

Author/Editor Bios Table Of Contents Rights Additional Information

Author/Editor Bios

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Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a poet, independent scholar, and activist. She is the author of Dub, Spill, and M Archive, all published by Duke University Press, as well as Undrowned and Survival is a Promise.

Table Of Contents

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1. Note: Airmail (dear reader: and what did i find?) 7
2. Holding With
3. a blue airmail letter (dear reader: how are we related?)
4. Slavery Is a Language: A Review of Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Transatlantic Slave Route by Saidiya Hartman
5. The First Cut Is the Deepest: A Mother-Daughter Conversation About Birth, Justice, Healing, and Love. Pauline Ann McKenzie and Alexis Pauline Gumbs
6. And How to Pay for It: Black Feminist Transnational Possibility in the Archive of Essence
7. BlueBellow (dear reader: of course I could never) 
8. Most Affectionately Ever Yours: Letters Between Tara Bynum and Alexis Pauline Gumbs
9. Diaspore: Letters Between Torkwase Dyson and Alexis Pauline Gumbs
10. Channel: Letters Between Christina Sharpe and Alexis Pauline Gumbs (dear reader: what is fiction?) 
11. The Sweetness of Salt: Toni Cade Bambara and the Practice of Pleasure (in Six Tributes)
12. Evidence (dear reader: what’s really in the middle of the circle?) 
13. Black Astrophysics: A Homemade Field of Love
14. Long-Distance Revolutionary: An Intergenerational Conversation, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Clyde Gumbs, and Jared Gumbs
15. Black Daughter/Father Poetics Beyond Patriarchal Longing, Alexis Pauline Gumbs with Clyde Gumbs
16. Critical Sweetness (dear reader: where do you think we go after we die?) 
17. Mouths of Rain: Be Opened 
18. Necessary as Water: Audre Lorde, Lydia Gumbs, Difference, and Survival (dear reader: what is it to know poetry?) 
19. the salt of the universe, Alexis Pauline Gumbs with Jeremiah Gumbs
20. the secret name: diasporic disremembering (dear reader: another way to be) 
21. Difficult Miracle 
22. Buy One, Get One. Free: A Pedagogy of Debt
23. Nobody Mean More: Black Feminist Pedagogy and Solidarity
24. The Shape of My Impact, or Sounds to Me Like a Promise: On Survival
25. Coda: debra
Acknowledgments
Appendix: APG’s Exam Lists from 2006 305
Index
 

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Sales/Territorial Rights: World

Rights and licensing

Additional Information

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Paper ISBN: 978-1-4780-3975-4 / Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4780-3484-1 / eISBN: 978-1-4780-6340-7 /