Rather, Being Property is after something fully other than the sort of academic demonstration of intellectual lineage or bald erudition prizes and promotions often demand. By turns leading-edge and unaffected, revelatory and understated, Bennett appears much less concerned to prove that his chops as a critic and theorist are equal to his poetic abilities. While Clifton and Wynter inform the animal association accruing to Being Property’ s title and subtitle, this first monograph bears little trace of the strain many scholarly debuts (my own included!) betray to demonstrate their debts. Bennett’s book is a work apart and worthy, to be sure, of the two Black women figures inspiring/inspiriting it without whom it seems Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man could scarcely have even been dreamt up: the late US poet, Lucille Clifton and the Jamaican novelist, dramatist and theorist, Sylvia Wynter.

Being Property issues from a different bent, though, even if it’s clear that a fine, expressive hand is behind it.

Before Being Property, Bennett charmed many a live audience with dazzling performances of spoken word virtuosity at popular poetry jam/slam events across the country (including a 2009 performance at the White House) and, between performances, worked to publish two collections of verse, The Sobbing School (2016) and Owed (2020). Today, Bennett is Mellon Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth University but Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man is hardly the 2016 Princeton PhD’s debut. Though Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man (Harvard University Press 2020) is the author’s first scholarly monograph, Joshua Bennett is a familiar name to many of us who read, teach, compose, or follow currents in Black poetry and performance. Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man The Author(s)

Being property once myself