Charles Chesnutt's queer ecology

For the purposes of this talk, I would like to pull from earlier work on a text that lays bare the historical ties between antiblack violence, ecology, and animality: Charles Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman. Specifically, I am interested in thinking about the various kinds of trans-species transformations that appear in the text, moments where enslaved blacks are transmogrified into various forms of nonhuman life, (e.g. mules, trees, wolves, golems) as a form of punishment for a perceived transgression of the social rules that govern plantation life. Attention to this queer ecology (to use a term invoked most recently by Timothy Morton, though it certainly has a much longer history) where there is no clear delineation between the inside and outside of bodies or hard and fast boundaries that might keep these intra-acting forms of life from slipping into one other, provides an opportunity for us to think in new, helpful ways about the unwieldy entanglements that predominated the lives of enslaved black workers in the material world, the fraught relationships across lines of species that were created during chattel slavery and its afterlife. I also see my talk as an opportunity for us, through the frame of something like queer ecology, to think about what kind of vocabulary Chesnutt's work gives us for living ecologically in the Anthropocene Age, to understand each and every one of ourselves as part of a lived environment that is always already rushing toward us at top speed, transforming us, acting upon humans in ways that unmake any sort of stable, reliable border between the body and nature. For Chesnutt, the primary matter at hand seems to be this very issue of proximity, how life on the plantation, specifically the presence of conjure as a mystical praxis, unmakes this myth of the human as a distant, disinterested master of the nonhuman realm. These slippages across lines of species and matter serve not only to remind us all of our enmeshedness in the natural world, they also emphasize, often to spectacular effect, the dehumanization that African Americans faced in their everyday lives after Emancipation. Many of Chesnutt's characters die or are irreparably injured after their transformation into nonhuman entities, a motif intended to signal a relationship between racial and ecological hegemony that was often ignored in Chesnutt's time, and remains under-theorized (though some contemporary work on environmental racism is certainly broadening the conversation) even now.

William Apess, the Raced Body, and the Naturalized Land

The title page of William Apess’s conversion narrative insists twice that the landscape where the author was born determines his identity: the book is titled A Son of the Forest and subtitled The Experiences of William Apes, a Native of the Forest. Initially, Apess’s forest may seem to be a familiar nineteenth-century topos, the generic home of the savages, noble or otherwise, who were the subjects of colonialist narratives of extermination, disappearance, or assimilation. Indeed, after his work was rediscovered, some cultural historians represented Apess as a Christianized Indian who adopted the language, ideology, and identity of his oppressors. Other readers, though, have demonstrated convincingly that Apess strategically adapted and redeployed early national political and religious discourses in order to condemn Jacksonian Indian policy, protest conditions on New England reservations, and lay the foundations for a radical pan-Indian political consciousness. I hope to contribute to the developing appreciation for Apess’s rhetorical “in-genuity” (21) by showing how his autobiography materializes the primitive forest of early national political discourse, evoking rural New England woodlands that were the physical environment Apess’s Pequot ancestors inhabited as common property before they were uprooted by racist settlers. By insisting on the forest’s materiality as the foundation of collective bodily life, Apess also gives it a new symbolic meaning, transforming it from a primeval wilderness into the homeland of an indigenous republicanism that he articulates in the language of anti-racist Methodism. Moreover, I hope to show that Apess redirects the Methodist discourses of temperance and steadiness in order to stage both his own embodiment and his survivance of what he implies is the common material inheritance of all natives in the early national period: both alienation from the land and bodily contamination by white blood and toxic alcohol.

Animal Humanism

In the antebellum United States, attempts to exclude non-white people from the category of the human illustrated why humanist arguments, such as the iconic antislavery question “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” became necessary to combat racism and slavery. However, the iconic emphasis of enslaved people’s humanity and their distinction from nonhuman animals was not abolitionism’s only way of referring to animals, and not all abolitionist arguments depended upon a model of sympathy that necessitated the sympathizer’s similarity to the enslaved. Abolitionist children’s literature published between the 1830s and the 1860s often employed animals in comparison with – rather than in distinction from – enslaved black people, with an effect distinctly different from the comparisons of scientific racism. Some of these texts used domesticated animals to mediate their readers’ sympathy for enslaved people. As I will argue, this model of sympathy which is not dependent upon articulations of sameness is a more progressive model for affective sympathy and kinship in that (unlike other, more prominent models of abolitionist sympathy, such as the employment of mixed-race characters to garner white sympathy) it has the potential for promoting such affective relationships across acknowledged positions of difference.

In my longer essay, I read abolitionist children’s literature in which such affective relationships are possible despite differences in race and species in order to show how this more progressive difference-based model of sympathy worked against the more prominent sameness-based model of abolitionist sympathy. Unlike the prioritization of sympathy for mixed-race people that is so prominent in abolitionist literature, the model of sympathy present in these animal-focused abolitionist stories and poems for children is more in line with progressive notions of antiracism which appreciate difference, rather than calling for its erasure.

A model of sympathy that has the potential to be conveyed across positions of difference opens up possibilities for both antiracist discourse and human-animal studies. When we ask for whom one can have sympathy, we must look beyond comparisons between beings, and the hierarchies that accompany them. My allusion to humanism connotes “humaneness,” or the particular valuation of human life, as the term sometimes signified in the nineteenth century. The abolitionist arguments I discuss depend upon the category of humanity – a category linked to notions of freedom, property, self-valuation, and Christianity. I present abolitionism as one version of humanism, in its dependence upon the category of the human for an ethics of interracial relations, but I argue that these literary comparisons of humans and other animals – primarily pets – have the potential for a more productive discussion of sympathy. Despite their failings, the texts I discuss present a model of sympathy that, by refusing to view difference as foil to sympathy, has the potential to resist the hierarchies of both race and species that were common to nineteenth-century discourses of scientific racism.

The Nature of the Text

            The longer essay from which my talk will be drawn takes the colonial encounter with nature – in Christopher Columbus’s writings and in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness – as a point of departure for a theoretical analysis of the environmental epistemology of literary texts.  Drawing on recent work in evolutionary psychology, environmental philosophy, and cognitive science, I focus on those moments when the human subject encounters an unfamiliar environment, one which challenges their affective and cognitive schema as well as their cultural biases, and which they wish to describe for other, non-present members of their social group.  The text that results might be called an “environmental report,” and it represents a vital form of writing not only in early colonial literature, but also in the American and Black Atlantic slave narrative, in the nineteenth-century response to industrialization and westward migration, and in many modern accounts of global migration.    The environmental report, I argue, represents an evolutionarily adaptive response to moments of historical and epistemic rupture, intellectual expansion, and social transformation – as experienced, phenomenologically, by an individual.  What I propose is a way of reading these texts which takes the dialectical relation between human interiority and natural exteriority as an ontological foundation for the cultural problems, conflicts, and histories they express.

The broader context for this argument involves the pervasive critical tension between humanism and culturalism: perhaps the central analytical faultline in literary ecocriticism specifically and environmental studies more generally.   Driving the debate have been, on the one hand, studies in modern environmental psychology, ecophenomenology, and cognitive science, and, on the other hand, the great many works being published which focus on cultural differences in how people experience or represent nature, from the perspectives of ethnic studies, postcolonialism, environmental justice, and the “new materialism.”  Against that background, I propose one way of bridging humanist and culturalist approaches to literary environmentality – namely, by formulating a theoretical model for understanding the epistemological value of representations of nature that are tangled up in problems of cross-cultural contact and conflict.

Stacy Alaimo on Race

Most scholarly contestations of race since the 1980s have employed social constructionist arguments to demonstrate that race is a social, not biological category, forged within a history of economic and political oppression, not simply found “in nature.” Interrogating racism has, for the most part, meant shifting attention away from ostensible racial differences toward the social and political forces that have constructed these differences. It is useful to notice, for our purposes here, that these arguments divert attention from material bodies per se, toward the ideologies and discourses that constitute them. 

Environmental justice science, literature, and activism, however, must to some degree focus on actual bodies, especially as they are transformed by their encounters with places, substances, and forces. Departing from the incisive philosophical analyses of the vast superstructures that support racial oppression, environmental justice activism needs to be rather literal, demonstrating material connections between specific bodies in specific places. 

Whereas the predominant academic theories of race have worked to undermine its ontological status via theories of social construction, environmental justice movements must produce or employ scientific data that track environmental hazards, placing a new sort of materiality at the forefront of many of these struggles. The emerging sciences of biomonitoring and the particular forms of environmental activism that they enable capture the biochemical interchanges between body and place, but they also recast the categories of race and class, which have been at the heart of environmental justice movements.

Environmental justice movements epitomize a trans-corporeal materiality, a conception of the body that is neither essentialist, nor genetically determined, nor firmly bounded, but rather a body in which social power and material/geographic agencies intra-act. If, as Rose argues, “biological citizenship” relocates

Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures : Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 2010: p. 61-63.

How Real is Race?

"There are important reasons not to eliminate all considerations of biology and the body from our discussions of race, provided we understand biology as mutually constituted with culture and as significantly less determinate that it is often taken to be. In particular ... an important dimension of what race is and how it functions results from the interaction of social ideologies of race with visible human difference" (324).

Michael Hames-Garcia, "How Real is Race?" In Material Feminisms, eds. Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman . Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 2008: 307-339.

Books on Race and Nature

Here are some recent books on race and nature:

• Adamson, Joni. American Indian Literature, Environmental Justice, and Ecocriticism: The Middle Place. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2001.
• Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2010.
• Hames-Garcia, Michael. “How Real is Race.” Material Feminisms. Eds. Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman. Bloomington: U of Indiana P, 2008. 308-39.
• Huggan, Graham and Helen Tiffin. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, and Environment. New York: Routledge, 2010.
• Outka, Paul. Race and Nature: From Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
• Ruffin, Kimberly N. Black on Earth: African American Ecoliterary Traditions. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2010.
• Wolfe, Cary. Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003.

Let's all add books and articles to this list and compile a working bibliography for our round-table discussion.

The Microhistory of Black Abolition

Recent debates surrounding the new materialism, as well emerging interest in race and materialism, find a fascinating precursor in the pages of antebellum African American newspapers and periodicals. The sciences of the second scientific revolution, or the “new sciences,” were embraced by some contributors as possible tools for emancipation and rejected by others for their forwarding of a gross materialism that besmirched sacred understandings of nature and the divine ordering of the natural world.  Early black newspapers show a broad array of responses to the new sciences, offering a glimpse onto the robust theorizations of race, nature, and materiality that were actively being constructed—and contested—by writers and readers of the early black press.

In addition to offering a brief overview to this robust discourse on materialism, I want to discuss the widespread coverage of microscopes in early African American newspapers, especially in Frederick Douglass’s three papers. The beginnings of the industrial manufacturing of microscopes in the 1840s in the U.S. allowed an increasing number of non-scientists and non-elites to catch glimpses of dazzlingly spectacular, previously unknown worlds through the optical powers of the microscope. The illumination of invisible beings and invisible worlds fostered a critical speculative imaginary for black freedom struggles, which were oriented toward the active (re)construction of a new world, or worlds, long before the official abolition of slavery.  From the scales of fish to the surface of human skin, the microscope also offered a strikingly defamiliarized view of both the body and the objects of the natural world, opening up a space for rich theorizations of race, subjectivity, and nature.  Finally, I am interested in how the microscope enabled a surprising set of identifications with microorganisms and other bodies invisible to the naked eye – what I want to call the microscopic imaginary of black abolition. And I’m wondering how these identifications with the microscopic challenge how we understand both the intelligibility and scale of anti-slavery struggles (macro- vs. micro- acts of resistance and escape) and the politics of fugitivity (as a terrain of strategic visibility and invisibility).

Ecocritique and Antislavery

    My dissertation, in large part, focuses on the literary production of authors affiliated with the antislavery Free Soil movement. Comprising a genealogy of third-party antislavery coalitions including the Liberty Party, the Liberty League, the Free Soil Party, the Radical Abolitionist Party, and ultimately the Republican Party, the Free Soil movement was characterized by economic and political resistance to the slave power, which, Free Soilers claimed, was weakening the U.S. economy, devaluing northern labor, degrading the natural resources of the South, and threatening to expand westward so as to create a continental empire for slavery. I argue that Free Soil, committed to preventing the expansion of the slave system, viewed slavery as both environmentally destructive and unsustainable. As such, Free Soil arguments were explicitly ecological, not only juxtaposing the beauty and productivity of Northern spaces with the dilapidated and blighted landscapes of the South, but also rendering slavery as pollutive and toxic. Authors affiliated with the Free Soil movement (including, for example, John Pierpont, John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Highland Garnet, Henry Bibb, Frederick Douglass, and Frederick Law Olmsted), channel Free Soil ideology to critique slavery, articulating an ecological antislavery ethic that renders slavery unnatural, destructive to the landscapes of the U.S., and environmentally unsustainable.
    I plan to address how Black Free Soilers in particular—such as Bibb, Douglass, Garnet, James W. C. Pennington, Samuel Ringgold Ward, and James M. Whitfield— in addition to using Free Soil arguments to condemn slavery, substantially revise Free Soil ideology so as to make it more ecological and anti-racist. These authors construct what I am referring to as the Free Soil critique. The Free Soil critique draws upon Free Soil discourse to critique slavery while simultaneously and reflexively critiquing Free Soil as a useful analytic but one that is significantly limited in regards to race and nature. The Free Soil critique argues that the risk society of U.S. slavery did not simply affect particular spaces and specific individuals, and it certainly could not be contained within certain limits. The very nature of slavery, the Free Soil critique explains, corrupts and pollutes everything. Abolition, and the Free Soil movement more specifically, cannot address questions of geography and labor without challenging the environmental roots of American racism, without recognizing how the slave system oppresses and alienates all laboring bodies in the U.S., without understanding how the environmental pollution of slavery infects the entire nation, and without working to destroy the barriers that free black farmers face in the North.
    As the Free Soil critique is preoccupied with expansion and pollution, I am drawing heavily upon new materialism, particularly the work of Stacy Alaimo, Jane Bennett, and Timothy Morton.

Naturalism, Race, and Transcorporealization

Research on environmental justice issues frequently emphasizes the uneven distribution of risk factors: differential exposures to “slow violence” (Nixon), risk-induced “transcorporeality” (Alaimo), & what I’ve called “fatal contiguities.” Is there a nineteenth-century genealogy for these concepts of environmental risk, & are there precedents for thinking about (or not thinking about) how risk factors intersect with racialization?

I’m planning to consider literary naturalism as a precursor, of sorts, to contemporary representations of risk-laden bodies and class- and race-based environmental injustice. Naturalism seems productive in this regard for a few reasons:

1.by treating humans as types and (at times) as animals moved by hereditary and environmental forces (often in urban settings), naturalism refuses any strict separation between the social and the natural.

2.by emphasizing environmental determinism, naturalism foregrounds how geography and unevenly distributed materials affect and produce human embodiment and consciousness.

3.naturalist fiction (by which, for now, I just mean works that 1 or more critics have argued are "naturalist") frequently highlights scenes in which persons intermingle with their environments: characters dissolving into climate (London, “To Build a Fire”), inhaling gas (Sister Carrie), disappearing into the urban darkness (Maggie), walking into the sea (Awakening), lying face-up beneath scintillant red chemicals (“The Monster”), covered in a film of smog and soot (Life in the Iron Mills), blending into wallpaper patterns (“Yellow Wall-Paper), or undergoing the slow “dissolution” induced by leprosy (London, “Sheriff of Kona”). These scenes have been read in terms of atavism and social critique, but they also function as moments of naturalist transcorporealization. That is, they tell us a lot about how the production of space leads to the production (and in many instances the undoing) of bodies and selves.

4.naturalist literature by writers like Norris, Crane, & London treats racial difference in problematic and sometimes contradictory ways. While these writers were restricted by social discourses that pitted the white working class against racialized and immigrant laborers, twentieth-century authors like Richard Wright and Helena Viramontes have appropriated and revised aspects of naturalist style to interrogate intersections between race, class, and environment. So I will either look at more recent uses of naturalist devices or interrogate how classic naturalist fiction represents “white” and other races.

Item from the Archive

Poster for a performance of Obi!, or Three Fingered Jack  (c. 1825) by Ira Aldridge
Image source: The History of Wolverhampton 
Read about it here.

Occasion

Paul Outka suggested in 2008 that “the time for a critical dialogue between those interested in deconstructing ‘nature’ and those engaged in deconstructing ‘race’ is long overdue” (Race and Nature 4). Since then, developments in science studies, posthumanism, and new materialism have framed that dialogue in ways that focus attention on intersectionality of the raced body and the naturalized land. In Bodily Natures (2010), Stacy Alaimo writes, "Casting racism as environmental exposes how sociopolitical forces generate landscapes that infiltrate human bodies. . . . [T]he penetrating physiological effects of class (and racial) oppression [demonstrate] that the biological and the social cannot be considered separate spheres" (28). Alaimo’s new materialist approach to the entangled processes of exploitation and oppression makes it possible to "rewrite the entire expanse of the history of the United States from an environmental justice perspective” (29).