Course No: 350:589
Index #: 17957
Distribution Requirement: A4, A5, C
Tuesdays - 10:20 AM
MU 207
Black Ecological Imagination
Mathes, Carter
Building on Joshua Bennett’s suggestions that black literature may offer both, “the very mechanism [for] disaggregating human personhood itself,” and a “kinship and commonalty among living and nonliving things alike,” this seminar focuses on the aesthetic and political engagements of black literary artists with(in) their specific ecological contexts, and through their considerations of race and the environment more broadly.
From Middle Passage and plantation ecologies, to contemporary carceral, urban, and rural black ecologies, our inquiry will be transhistorical and hemispheric, examining writing that imaginatively and critically explores questions of blackness and being, race and the outdoors, built environments, extraction, enslavement, colonialism, reconstruction, industrialization, (un/natural) disaster, weather, animality, and more.
We’ll consider the centrality of gender and sexuality to various black ecological contexts, and we will engage with the recent proliferation of critical work on race and the environment. Our interdisciplinary inquiry will also put literary work into conversation with music, photography, film, and video/sound installations. One aim of our study across literary genres and artistic forms will be to consider how ideas and practices of aesthetic innovation enrich and expand our ability to conceptualize the many dimensions of the ecological within black life.
Primary texts (primarily novels, short stories, and poetry) may include work from Zora Neale Hurston, Ann Petry, Aime Cesaire, Patrick Chamoiseau, Henry Dumas, Harriet Jacobs, Eric Walrond, Kamau Brathwaite, Edouard Glissant, Jean Toomer, W.E.B. DuBois, Ann Spencer, Chester Himes, Will Alexander, Bessie Head, Jayne Cortez, Alice Walker, Octavia Butler, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Michelle Cliff, Yusef Komunyaaka.
Our critical readings will feature essays, chapters, or monographs from Kim Ruffin, Katherine McKittrick, Clyde Woods, JT Roane, Monique Allewart, Sonya Postmentier, Joshua Bennett, Tiffany Lethabo King, Nathan Hare, Jennifer James, Frantz Fanon, Annisa Janine Wardi, Sylvia Wynter, Christina Sharpe, Carlyn Ferrari.
Assignments/writing will entail a book review, annotated bibliography, blog post, and a short (conference presentation length) essay.