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).