Race and Nature: Occasion

Monday, February 4, 2013

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).

No comments:

Post a Comment

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.