In November, 1781, the captain of the slave ship Zong ordered that some 150 Africans be murdered by drowning so that the ship's owners could collect insurance monies. Relying entirely on the words of the legal decision Gregson v. Gilbert―the only extant public document related to the massacre of these African slaves―Zong! tells the story that cannot be told yet must be told. Equal parts song, moan, shout, oath, ululation, curse, and chant, Zong! excavates the legal text. Memory, history, and law collide and metamorphose into the poetics of the fragment. Through the innovative use of fugal and counterpointed repetition, Zong! becomes an anti-narrative lament that stretches the boundaries of the poetic form, haunting the spaces of forgetting and mourning the forgotten. Check for the online reader's companion at http://zong.site.wesleyan.edu.

Zong! (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Literature & Fiction

Philip, M. NourbeSe

Poetry

Wesleyan University Press

Reference

Brilliant, lyrical, and passionate, this collection from the acclaimed poet M. NourbeSe Philip is an extended jazz riff running along the themes of language, racism, colonialism, and exile. In this groundbreaking collection, Philip defiantly challenges and resoundingly overthrows the silencing of black women through appropriation of language, offering no less than superb poetry resonant with beauty and strength. She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks was originally published in 1989 and won the Casa de Las Americas Prize. This new Wesleyan edition includes a foreword by Evie Shockley. An online reader's companion will be available at http://nourbesephilip.site.wesleyan.edu.

She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Wesleyan

Now in its 7th printing: A woman, travelling alone through time, Africa, and unnamed lands, searches for Dr. David Livingstone, celebrated by the West as a "discoverer" of Africa. Looking for Livingstone explodes Western assumptions about the "silence" of indigenous peoples; this is an elegant work which beautifully gives voice to the ancestors to whom it is dedicated.

Looking for Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence

United States

Mercury Pr

This long-awaited collection of essays consists of selected writings from Guggenheim Fellow Marlene Nourbese Philip?s wide-ranging appearances in magazines, newspapers, and journals, including FUSE. Biting, elegant, by turns fiercely questioning, magically lyrical, and gently probing, Philip?s examination of contemporary issues of race and culture is always eloquent and commanding.

Frontiers: Selected Essays and Writings on Racism and Culture 1984-1992

Politics & Social Sciences

Anthropology

"Philip?s questions are difficult, and of an intensity of insistence rarely achieved."? Erin Mouré, Books in Canada "Philip?s writing lives on a linguistic frontier where the essay and poem merge to create a new literary form, uniquely hers. These pieces are a pleasure to read? at once sensual and thought-provoking."? Robin C. Pacific "[Philip deploys] all thoughtful ways of making readers aware of how history is created. And how it is denied."? Canadian Materials

A Genealogy of Resistance: And Other Essays

Social Sciences

In November, 1781, the captain of the slave ship Zong ordered that some 150 Africans be murdered by drowning so that the ship's owners could collect insurance monies. Relying entirely on the words of the legal decision Gregson vs Gilbert (the only extant public document related to the massacre of these African slaves), Zong! tells the story that cannot be told yet must be told. Equal parts song, moan, shout, oath, ululation, curse, and chant, Zong! excavates the legal text. Memory, history and law collide and metamorphose into the poetics of the fragment. Through the innovative use of fugal and counterpointed repetition, Zong! becomes an anti-narrative lament that stretches the boundaries of the poetic form, haunting the spaces of forgetting and mourning the forgotten.

Zong!: As Told to the Author by Setaey Adamu Boateng

History & Criticism

Zong!: As told to the author by Setaey Adamu Boateng

Graywolf Press

Literary Nonfiction. BLANK is a collection of previously out-of-print essays and new works by one of Canada's most important contemporary writers and thinkers. Through an engagement with her earlier work, M. NourbeSe Philip comes to realize the existence of a repetition in the world: the return of something that, while still present, has become unembedded from the world, disappeared. Her imperative becomes to make us see what has gone unseen, by writing memory upon the margin of history, in the shadow of empire and at the frontier of silence. In heretical writings that work to make the disappeared perceptible, BLANK explores questions of race, the body politic,timeliness, recurrence, ongoingness, art, and the so-called multicultural nation. Through these considerations, Philip creates a linguistic form that registers the presence of what has seemingly dissolved, a form that also imprints the loss and the silence surrounding those disappearances in its very presence. "Poet, Essayist, Novelist, Playwright, Public Intellectual: M. NourbeSe Philip is the principal—and most principled—woman-of-letters in English right now. Her every word is a must-read because she writes nothing that doesn't change everything. She isn't politic; she's political. Unabashedly. Her ruthless truth-telling is page-turning and paradigm-overturning."—George Elliott Clarke "M. NourbeSe Philip's is the voice of a Canadian poet-prophet . . . To read BLANK—new essays as well as selected writings from her 1994 collection Frontiers—is to understand that Philip, in habitual eloquent and poetic prose, was warning us in 1994 about the dystopia of right wing populism, violent racism, and virulent sexism we witness unfolding right here, right now in 2017. In Canada. Not just South of the border or in other places across the world . . . Philip has been and continues to be, in her own words in BLANK, the 'disappeared and unembedded' poet of our amnesiac times; to read her is to understand how we might survive the ravages of racism, cultural conflict, and geopolitical violence of the 21st century. This is an urgent task . . . We need(ed) this book. We need(ed) to listen. Philip, in BLANK, has given us the gift of another opportunity. We need(ed) to take it. If not now, when?"—Dr. Richard Douglas-Chin "In BLANK M. NourbeSe Philip shares how the lonely impossibility of black is an articulation of black life. This collection, a gathering of her past and present essays on black diasporic politics, tracks how Philip's poetics emerge from exile—the ungrieveable middle passage and the wreckage of empire enveloping us all, globally. Here we must sit with the inflexible logics of racial capitalism, unfolding in Canada and elsewhere, as these logics are re-languaged by Philip as poetic diasporic struggle. Philip's insights on how race and racism emerge in and beyond Canada, in the form of staged and unstaged misrepresentation, are enmeshed with a politics of (longstanding) refusal that animates the black diaspora."—Katherine McKittrick "Philip's questions are difficult, and of an intensity of insistence rarely achieved." —Erin Mouré "Those still confused about why poetry might fracture and splinter and stutter can find an answer in the work of M. NourbeSe Philip." —Juliana Spahr

Blank: Essays and Interviews (3) (Essais Series)

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

Book*hug Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Philip, M. NourbeSe. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Philip, M. NourbeSe

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Philip, M. NourbeSe. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Zong! (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Zong! (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Looking for Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence

Frontiers: Selected Essays and Writings on Racism and Culture 1984-1992

A Genealogy of Resistance: And Other Essays

Zong!: As Told to the Author by Setaey Adamu Boateng

Zong!: As told to the author by Setaey Adamu Boateng

Blank: Essays and Interviews (3) (Essais Series)