ABSTRACT
Since its violent origins in the wake of the transatlantic slave trade, African American literature has often proposed Africana cosmologies and epistemologies as both humane and ecological antidotes to supposedly humanist ideologies of Euro-America. Today, in the face of exacerbating crises of anti-Blackness and imperialistic ecocide, Black authors revisit histories of Afro-diasporic survival in search of models for imagining human and larger-than-human life at—or even after—the end of the world. This chapter considers poems by Nikki Giovanni, Tracy K. Smith, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs that turn to the histories of the Middle Passage to imagine Black futures guided by eco-humanist thinking.
