Wandering

Combining black feminist theory, philosophy, and performance studies, Sarah Jane Cervenak ruminates on the significance of physical and mental roaming for black freedom. She is particularly interested in the power of wandering or daydreaming for those whose mobility has been under severe constraint, from the slave era to the present. Since the Enlightenment, wandering has been considered dangerous and even criminal when associated with people of color. Cervenak engages artist-philosophers who focus on wayward movement and daydreaming, or mental travel, that transcend state-imposed limitations on physical, geographic movement. From Sojourner Truth's spiritual and physical roaming to the rambling protagonist of Gayl Jones's novel Mosquito, Cervenak highlights modes of wandering that subvert Enlightenment-based protocols of rationality, composure, and upstanding comportment. Turning to the artists Pope.L (William Pope.L), Adrian Piper, and Carrie Mae Weems, Cervenak argues that their work produces an otherworldly movement, an errant kinesis that exceeds locomotive constraints, resisting the straightening-out processes of post-Enlightenment, white-supremacist, capitalist, sexist, and heteronormative modernity. Their roaming animates another terrain, one where free, black movement is not necessarily connected to that which can be seen, touched, known, and materially valued.

“Cervenak's Wandering questions the very essence of wandering instead of simply adding a new magnitude to it.” , “'Wandering,' in Sarah Jane Cervenak’s ambitious new book, is both an invitation and a warning…. Read alongside three contemporary performance and visual artists whom Cervenak considers in the conclusion, all of these philosophers offer models to exist, dream, imagine, move, and live in a world intent on constraining and restraining black freedom in all its varied forms.”, “This concise and insightful book was written from the perspective of performance studies, but as an interdisciplinary exercise it has much to offer historians who confront absence and contradictions in their research on slavery and race…. Cervenak strikes an effective balance as she lucidly examines black authors’ work even as she honors what they do not say or show as an act of resistance.”, "[I]t became increasingly clear that even if Cervenak's text does not have musical references as works cited, this does not mean that the text does not swing, as sponsored by a summer breeze. Therefore, fully aware of the forthcoming holiday season, perhaps what the text encourages you, its muse, to do, albeit (a)religiously, is to wonder as you wander . . .", "A valuable contribution to studies of mobility, Wandering is particularly well-suited for readers interested in black feminist theory, philosophy, performance studies, and intellectual history." 

Sarah Jane Cervenak is Assistant Professor of Women's and Gender Studies and African American Studies at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.