This class will broaden traditional conceptions of nature writing by reading selected texts from the African American literary tradition that focus on representations of race and ecology as intimately related rather than independent. Drawing on the insights of Black Studies and Ecocriticism, we will see how the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman have been productively challenged in African American literary texts since the nineteenth century. Throughout the course, we will consider the organizing tropes (personification, metaphor) these texts use to imagine human and nonhuman relations and encounters, as well as the most important sites of these encounters, such as rivers, swamps, and oceans. We will also consider several literary genres—including the slave narrative, realism, and speculative fiction—in order to think about how Black American authors have staged the entanglements of race (as well as gender and class) and ecology in their efforts to expand the definitions of nature and nature writing. We will begin with excerpts from African American slave narratives and early African American novels to frame our discussions of twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts by authors such as Toni Morrison and N.K. Jemisin.
- Dozent/in: Matthew Scully