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.