Race and Nature: Item from the Archive

Monday, February 4, 2013

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.

1 comment:

Lance NewmanFebruary 4, 2013 at 10:16 AM
I've been fascinated by this play ever since I saw it performed at the NASSR conference in September 2000. The title character is a slave who escapes from a Caribbean plantation and uses a nearby wilderness as a base of operations from which to revenge himself upon his former master.
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What We Are Talking About

Participants in this roundtable discussion will examine the current state of the dialogue between critical race studies and ecocriticism on the textual ground of 19^th-century American literature. We will consider questions at the intersection of race and nature such as the following: How have discourses of race and nature coevolved, coincided, or interacted? How do considerations of race complicate notions of post-humanism and animality? What is the future of the critical conversation about raced bodies in the material world?

Initial Participants

· Joshua Bennett, Doctoral Candidate, Princeton University, working on A Mutiny of Objects: Matters of Life, Death and Animacy in 19th Century Black Performance

· Brigitte Fielder, Associate Lecturer, University of Wisconsin, working on Animal Humanism: Species, Race, and Humanity in Nineteenth-Century American Literatures

· James Finley, Doctoral Candidate, University of New Hampshire, working on ‘Violence Done to Nature’: Free Soil and the Environment in Antebellum Antislavery Writing

· Ian Finseth, Associate Professor, University of North Texas, author of Shades of Green: Visions of Nature in the Literature of American Slavery, 1770-1865

· Hsuan Hsu, Associate Professor, University of California, Davis, author of Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2010).

· Jennifer James, Associate Professor, George Washington University, author of A Freedom Bought with Blood: African American War Literature, the Civil War - World War II.

· Lance Newman, Professor, Westminster College, working on Landscapes of Resistance: the Radical Pastoral in Transatlantic Romanticism

· Britt Rusert, Assistant Professor, U. Mass. Amherst, working on Radical Empiricism: Fugitive Science and the Struggle for Emancipation.