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.
“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) "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) "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) “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) “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) “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)
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