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.