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Shades of Green: Visions of Nature in the Literature of American Slavery, 1770–1860; Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery
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Finseth as discussed by the authors argues for the foundational role of nature in the development of racial ideology and demonstrates how understandings of nature animated and delineated discussions of racial identity and, by extension, slavery.Abstract:
The two books under review offer new avenues into the understanding of racial formation in the United States. Shades of Green focuses on nature’s role in defining race during the early national and antebellum periods, and Laughing Fit to Kill examines black humor’s critique of racial stereotypes in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Both books are excellent additions to the critical field of U.S. literary race studies. Ian Finseth’s Shades of Green investigates the complex entanglements of race, nature, and culture. Revealing how eighteenthand nineteenth-century understandings of race spring from natural science and philosophy and are embedded in depictions of the natural world, Finseth argues for the foundational role of nature in the development of racial ideology. Through a wideranging analysis of cultural discourses (natural science, natural philosophy, geography, phenomenology, aesthetics, religion, politics, and economics), he convincingly demonstrates how understandings of nature animated and delineated discussions of racial identity and, by extension, slavery. Although Finseth shows how extensively this issue permeated U.S. literature and culture, he focuses most specifically on how representations of nature influenced antislavery thought. In deploying images of the natural world to mobilize public opinion for sociopolitical change, antislavery writers often conveyed a contradictory message that naturalized racial difference even as it accused slavery of violating natural liberty. Finseth’s focus on antislavery discourse underscores the difficulty of translating cultural ideas into political action. This study is as remarkable for its depth as for its breadth. The book is Book Reviewsread more
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Guest Editors' Introduction: The Shoulders We Stand On: An Introduction to Ethnicity and Ecocriticism
Joni Adamson,Scott Slovic +1 more
TL;DR: In the wake of large-scale events such as Hurricane Katrina, there is growing consensus that social justice and environmental issues are linked as mentioned in this paper. But for decades before Katrina there were profound tensions between the concerns of the activists, scholars, and leaders of the mainstream conservation-and wilderness-oriented environmental movement and those of the US Environmental Justice movement, who argued that environmental and social issues could not be separated, and these tensions were dramatically illustrated in 2004 when Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus released "The Death of Environmentalism," a report addressing the environmental movement's failure to achieve
Journal ArticleDOI
Arithmetic and Afro-Atlantic pastoral protest: The place of (in)numeracy in Gronniosaw and Equiano
TL;DR: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789) as discussed by the authors is the first Afro-Atlantic autobiography written with a quantitatively sophisticated and cosmopolitan African voice as well as the earliest complex pastoral text by a black Atlantic author.
Cultivation and Catastrophe: Forms of Nature in Twentieth-Century Poetry of the Black Diaspora
TL;DR: The authors make the case for poetry as the quintessential genre of diaspora, revealing a black poetics capacious enough to encompass the disjunctive transnational ecologies of diverse post-slavery landscapes.
Journal ArticleDOI
Writing against Wilderness: María Amparo Ruiz de Burton's Elite Environmental Justice
Journal ArticleDOI
Encountering Early American Environments
TL;DR: The most prominent foci of the most recent conferences of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) have most recently been squarely focused on presentist concerns as discussed by the authors, such as interrogation of the anthropocene, exploration of generic and thematic tendencies of CliFi (climate fiction), incorporation of the literatures of environmental justice, and enrichment of the field's theoretical contributions by defining and exploring such concepts as multispecies ethnography, affective approaches, biosemiotics, and global indigeneity.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
Guest Editors' Introduction: The Shoulders We Stand On: An Introduction to Ethnicity and Ecocriticism
Joni Adamson,Scott Slovic +1 more
TL;DR: In the wake of large-scale events such as Hurricane Katrina, there is growing consensus that social justice and environmental issues are linked as mentioned in this paper. But for decades before Katrina there were profound tensions between the concerns of the activists, scholars, and leaders of the mainstream conservation-and wilderness-oriented environmental movement and those of the US Environmental Justice movement, who argued that environmental and social issues could not be separated, and these tensions were dramatically illustrated in 2004 when Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus released "The Death of Environmentalism," a report addressing the environmental movement's failure to achieve
Journal ArticleDOI
Arithmetic and Afro-Atlantic pastoral protest: The place of (in)numeracy in Gronniosaw and Equiano
TL;DR: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789) as discussed by the authors is the first Afro-Atlantic autobiography written with a quantitatively sophisticated and cosmopolitan African voice as well as the earliest complex pastoral text by a black Atlantic author.
Cultivation and Catastrophe: Forms of Nature in Twentieth-Century Poetry of the Black Diaspora
TL;DR: The authors make the case for poetry as the quintessential genre of diaspora, revealing a black poetics capacious enough to encompass the disjunctive transnational ecologies of diverse post-slavery landscapes.
Journal ArticleDOI
Writing against Wilderness: María Amparo Ruiz de Burton's Elite Environmental Justice
Journal ArticleDOI
Encountering Early American Environments
TL;DR: The most prominent foci of the most recent conferences of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) have most recently been squarely focused on presentist concerns as discussed by the authors, such as interrogation of the anthropocene, exploration of generic and thematic tendencies of CliFi (climate fiction), incorporation of the literatures of environmental justice, and enrichment of the field's theoretical contributions by defining and exploring such concepts as multispecies ethnography, affective approaches, biosemiotics, and global indigeneity.