The Lonely Letters

Ashon T. Crawley

Hardcover

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Winner:Lambda Literary Award -Nonfiction (2021)

In The Lonely Letters, A tells Moth: "Writing about and thinking with joy is what sustains me, daily. It nourishes me. I do not write about joy primarily because I always have it. I write about joy, Black joy, because I want to generate it, I want it to emerge, I want to participate in its constant unfolding." But alongside joy, A admits to Moth, come loneliness, exclusion, and unfulfilled desire. The Lonely Letters is an epistolary blackqueer critique of the normative world in which Ashon T. Crawley--writing as A--meditates on the interrelation of blackqueer life, sounds of the Black church, theology, mysticism, and love. Throughout his letters, A explores blackness and queerness in the musical and embodied experience of Blackpentecostal spaces and the potential for platonic and erotic connection in a world that conspires against blackqueer life. Both a rigorous study and a performance, The Lonely Letters gestures toward understanding the capacity for what we study to work on us, to transform us, and to change how we inhabit the world.

Book Details

Publisher: Duke University Press
Publish Date: Apr 10th, 2020
Pages: 280
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 0.00in - 0.00in - 0.00in - 0.00lb
EAN: 9781478007760
Categories: • African American & Black• Christianity - Pentecostal & Charismatic• LGBTQ+ Studies - General

About the Author

Ashon T. Crawley is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and African American Studies at the University of Virginia and author of Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility.

Praise for this book

"Ashon T. Crawley pushes his readers to contemplate the intimacy of living the life of the mind as a spiritual, enfleshed, and intellectual matter. Rejecting the intellect/emotion division through a rendering of intimacy and desire, The Lonely Letters stands as the achievement of aspirations long discussed but largely elusive in both feminist and queer criticism. A stunning and innovative work."--Imani Perry, author of "Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation"

"The Lonely Letters is a joyful mourning, a celebratory treatise, a rigorous performance, and an analysis of race and philosophy, aesthetics and blackness, and much more. I could not put it down and at points found myself laughing and in tears, all the while learning. Truly pathbreaking, it is an astounding, innovative, and deeply affecting work."--Nicole R. Fleetwood, author of "On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination"

"The Lonely Letters, from A to Moth, from Crawley to us, is ultimately an illumination of a way to Baby Suggs' clearing in Beloved, the site of blackqueer care, the site of grace--an invitation to 'refuse the prison of "I" and choose the open spaces of "we."'"--Yumi Pak "American Studies" (12/1/2020 12:00:00 AM)

"I admire Crawley's writing about queerness and sociality profoundly. I revere his embrace of the epistolary, of the way he makes academic writing feel pulsing and alive, enacted with breath and desire and shouting and song. . . . [E]ach letter is a flexing, embodied interweaving of queer theory, Black studies, music, eros, intellect, art, friendship, religion, body, breath. It is critical and creative all at once."--Ayden Leroux "Full Stop" (11/4/2021 12:00:00 AM)

"Crawley opens the world of critical theory (a discipline not known best for being welcoming to all minds and approaches) to those readers who might not have a background in it."
--Leora Fridman "Full Stop" (11/4/2021 12:00:00 AM)

"The Lonely Letters, in thinking through and with Black life, challenges the reader to (re)imagine religion, mysticism, epistemology, performance, and the possibility of life together otherwise.... [It] bears the potential to push religious studies scholarship beyond what was presumed possible."--Christopher Hunt "Journal of Africana Religions" (1/1/2022 12:00:00 AM)

"The Lonely Letters arrives as a wonderful surprise: it invites us to sit with vulnerability, and to ask what vulnerability might offer our world-imagining practices."--Keguro Macharia "GLQ" (6/1/2022 12:00:00 AM)

"You can't review [The Lonely Letters]. Because you haven't just read a book. You've had an encounter. A beautiful, blackqueer, encounter."--Biko Gray "Reading Religion" (5/29/2022 12:00:00 AM)