01 TTH5 CAC 12167 WALLACE HC-S126
Afro-Ecologies: Nature Writing and the African American Imagination
This seminar brings to light a tradition of African American literature that is concerned to explore the relationship of African American cultural life with nature. We shall study prose and poetry from the nineteenth century to the present in order to map the ways African American writers in slavery and freedom voiced black environmental thought creatively. A significant feature of our discussion and writing in this course shall be the urgency of thinking about African American nature writing not so much as a literature of naturalist observation or poetic pastoralism as a form of speculative writing and critical reflection on the wider possibilities of the human/nature relation than canonical “nature writing” has tended to imagine. What would it mean, in other words, to refuse to relegate the tree or the forest or the Great Dismal Swamp in North Carolina and Virginia to setting alone? How do African American writers represent other biotic entities as witnesses and participants in the freedom struggles of African American people? What might be learned from the African American eco-literary tradition for a more ethical stewardship of the earth’s interests—if not, better put, a more just partnership with the earth—with the mutual flourishing the earth and its diverse inhabitants in mind? Our study shall be guided by short works from Solomon Northup (Twelve Years a Slave), Paul Laurence Dunbar (“The Haunted Oak”), Charles Chesnutt (selections from The Conjure Woman) and Angelina Weld Grimke (“Blackness,” “Goldie”) in the nineteenth century. Among twentieth-century writers, we shall cover prose and poetry by Jean Toomer (Cane), Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God), Alice Walker (Meridian) and contemporary “black/ ecopoet/ observ[ing]/ the changing/ world from/ a high-rise/ window,” Ed Roberson (selections from To See the Earth Before the End of the World). Modest research, four (4) short creative or critical writing exercises (two [2] pages each), and a ten to twelve (10-12) page final paper required.