Synopses & Reviews
Following the innovative collection Spill, Alexis Pauline Gumbs's M Archive — the second book in a planned experimental triptych — is a series of poetic artifacts that speculatively documents the persistence of Black life following a worldwide cataclysm. Engaging with the work of the foundational Black feminist theorist M. Jacqui Alexander, and following the trajectory of Gumbs's acclaimed visionary fiction short story "Evidence," M Archive is told from the perspective of a future researcher who uncovers evidence of the conditions of late capitalism, antiblackness, and environmental crisis while examining possibilities of being that exceed the human. By exploring how Black feminist theory is already after the end of the world, Gumbs reinscribes the possibilities and potentials of scholarship while demonstrating the impossibility of demarcating the lines between art, science, spirit, scholarship, and politics.
Review
"The mythology that Gumbs develops from the artifacts of future black life and memory works to reveal an existence 'on the verge of regenerating the cells that would let us dream deep enough to remember.'" Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
Review
"Reading this gift of writing I keep gasping! Is Alexis writing from the bottom of the ocean, or the far-off future, or from inside the mind of God-is-change? How does she see everything so clearly? How does she make such incredible connections for us? This writing is generous and genius. It feels like fiction that taps into the deepest vein of sentience, that is also instantly sacred text. Thank you, Alexis, and bless you." adrienne maree brown, author of Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
Review
"Alexis Pauline Gumbs presents a brilliant, highly original theorization of the impact of a dystopic reality on black consciousness and black bodies, asking: how will they act as archives of the end of the world as we know it? By articulating black bodies as critical sites of archival knowledge, Gumbs reads them beyond historical notions of catastrophic suffering as racialized subjects." Alexis De Veaux, author of Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde
About the Author
Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a poet, independent scholar, and activist. She is the author of Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity, also published by Duke University Press; coeditor of Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines; and the founder and director of Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind, an educational program based in Durham, North Carolina.