Environmental Knowledge, Race, and African Amer. Literature

Many will associate African American literature with issues like slavery, civil rights, and the fight against racism. By far fewer, however, may think of nature, ecology, and care for the environment. Against this tendency, this research project shows how African American literature, even in its earliest written forms that emerged during a time in which racial slavery still existed in the U.S. South, expressed intimate relations to non-human nature, for example to animals, plant life, or landscapes. The project examines a traditional environmental knowledge in African American literature and demonstrates how African American writers of the nineteenth century found their own ways and techniques to describe non-human nature while simultaneously articulating social criticism. The book is divided into two parts that focus on two historical periods. On the one hand, it turns to texts of the three decades leading up to the American Civil War, the so-called antebellum period. On the other hand, the book considers literature written after the war and the abolition of slavery in the United States. Before the Civil War, both freeborn African Americans and those born into slavery who escaped their enslavement produced a variety of literary works. The most prominent genre that developed at this time was the fugitive slave narrative. The first part of this book shows how such slave narratives describe nature by using means and perspectives that diverge from mainstream Romanticism. The narratives, for example, articulate alternative relations to wilderness, rural spaces, or to spaces of flight, in which runaways from slavery not only collaborated with human helpers who were opposed to slavery, but also used their knowledge about non-human animals, plant life, and landscapes as means of resistance. The second part of the book looks at works written in the decades after the end of the Civil War in 1865, up until the turn of the twentieth century. During this period, many of the ideas about nature that were first articulated in antebellum writing such as the slave narratives are picked up and transformed, for instance in novels or short stories. Ideas and spaces of nature become part of writing about dominant themes such as education, home, and African American social progress. Moreover, many African American writers seek to find and express new relations between humans and labor in relation to nature, in order to overcome the traumas of slavery and fight racism and racial segregation. Ultimately, the texts considered in this book show that African American literature has a long and rich tradition of environmental knowledge, which is often linked to fighting racial injustices, and from which we may learn a lot today, in a world facing both environmental and social challenges.