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.