After his escape from slavery in 1838, Frederick Douglass not only turned himself into the mystically brilliant orator we celebrate until today, but also became widely travelled in the northern and mid-western parts of the United States. Settling down in the fugitive haven of New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he changed his name, joined the AME Zion Church, and subscribed to William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator, Douglass began working as a general agent of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in 1841. While his ensuing travels, which took him as far as Ohio, Indiana, and ultimately across the Atlantic to Great Britain, have been well-documented by biographers and historians, what has largely escaped notice so far is a visit Douglass paid to Niagara Falls in 1843.Footnote 1 Apparently fascinated with this icon of “Nature’s Nation,” Douglass recounts his first impression of the cataracts in an “Anti-Slavery Album of Contributions From Friends of Freedom” of the Western Abolitionist Society in a handwritten note dated “Aug 2d 1843” as follows:

When I came into its awful presence the power of discription [sic!] failed me, an irresistible power closed my lips completely, charmed I stood with eyes fixed, all, all absorbed.—Scarcely conscious of my own existence, I felt as I never felt before. The heavy trees all around me quivered the ground trembled,—the mighty rocks shook!—as its awful roar gave them its terrible mandate. My courage quailed. In unison with tree rock hill and water, I trembled totally subdued I stood in solemn reverance. The awful God—was there! (Douglass, “Niagara” 184)Footnote 2

The passage, at first sight, appears strikingly similar to the responses of Douglass’s Euro-American contemporaries. It is oozing with sublime rhetoric, as it includes the common reference to God, displays stock vocabulary of a multi-sensorial experience that witnessing the cataracts entailed (“awful roar”; “with eyes fixed”), and involves a rhetoric that presents Niagara Falls as transcending representability (“the power of discription [sic!] failed me”). Moreover, Douglass’s note exposes a typical reflection on preconceptions while or before witnessing Niagara’s monumental nature:

I went to this wonderful place with the most lofty expec[ta]tions. I had heard—read—thought and felt much in regard to it. I had frequently gazed with extreme delight upon its mini[a]ture I longed to go behold the original. In my imagination, I had often seen its broad-blue waters rushing on amidst the dim-dark gloom of its own creation—toward the awful cataract—threatening total distruction [sic!] to any power interposing a barrier to its onward progress. Its in[s]piration of beauty—grandness—wonder and terror (long before I saw it) danced sportively in my soul […]. (183)

These lines reveal not only how quickly and impressively Douglass had familiarized himself with dominant aesthetic conventions of his day. Moreover, they highlight his engagement with the idea of the visitor’s (and his ownFootnote 3) preconceptions, which was characteristic of a Niagara discourse that began to flourish from the 1830s on. As the site lost its remoteness with the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, travelers’ accounts increasingly came to weigh their witnessing of the natural spectacle against their anticipatory imaginations and assessed their actual experience both positively in terms of exceeding admiration and negatively in terms of disappointment.Footnote 4 Even as Douglass’s text moves exclusively in the former, more appreciative, direction, his note in this respect embraces yet another characteristic facet of Niagara writing. It seems, so far, a prototypical example of antebellum sublime discourse on Niagara Falls.

Significantly, however, Douglass adds a distinctive element to his portrayal by inserting a game-changing sentence: “As I approached it [Niagara Falls] I felt somewhat as I did at the approaching how [sic!], when for the first time I was to stand on free soil. And breath free air” (183). At the interstice between revealing his preconceived idea of Niagara Falls and representing his encounter of the cataracts, Douglass thereby explicitly draws attention to his former enslavement by analogizing the experience of overcoming slavery with a sublime experience of Niagara. The distinctiveness in perspective that results from this strategy of adding a more self-referential dimension to his record of encountering Niagara interrupts a process of transcendence and a universalism characteristic of the sublime as a concept, which was “not restricted to value judgments,” but also described “a state of mind” (Shaw 1). The sublime, after all, emerged as a category and marker of enlightened humanity and implied a form of humanizing universalism that “naturalized” the sublime experience of sites like Niagara Falls as characteristically human experience.Footnote 5 In his note, Douglass sets himself apart from this (supposed) universalism of the sublime by introducing the particular perspective of one who had been enslaved and whose enslavement had been justified by a de-humanizing racialization. Likening the experience of “standing on free soil” for the first time to experiencing Niagara’s sublime nature marks sublime sentiment and language as socially conditioned. Douglass’s intervention deflates a supposed universalism, de-naturalizes the sublime with respect to Niagara Falls, and grounds the sublime within social experience, hinting at its constructedness and “whiteness” as a rhetorical mode and aesthetic category that racialized experiences of nature. By inserting his experience within the social as significantly shaping his experience of the non-human natural, and implying that an unmarked and seemingly universal but thereby privileged position postulated in the sublime must also always be a construed one, Douglass’s note signifies on the sublime, strategizes its rhetoric, and simultaneously celebrates and politicizes Niagara’s nature from an African American perspective.

Almost 60 years later, another African American writer, Charles Waddell Chesnutt, places Niagara Falls at the center of one of his texts. In “The Passing of Grandison,” part of the celebrated short story collection The Wife of His Youth (1899), the North Carolinian author of mixed racial heritage employs Niagara not merely as background and setting, but as a vital part of his narrative strategy. The story, a trickster narrative set in antebellum times, proceeds straightforward enough, as a seemingly omniscient voice relates how a well-off adolescent Southerner, Dick Owens, attempts to win the heart of a belle, Charity Lomax, by secretly running off one of his father’s (Colonel Owens) enslaved to the North. As Charity dares him to do “something heroic,” Dick sets out for the Free states with Grandison, a trusted enslaved individual whom the Colonel deems “abolitionist-proof” (111, 116). They travel through New York and Boston where every effort to entice Grandison to take his freedom fails, and finally reach Niagara Falls, where, Dick hopes, once they arrive on the Canadian side, Grandison will realize “that he is actually free” and will “stay” (120). He seems, however, mistaken once more as Grandison’s response to his young master’s “raising his voice above the roar of the cataract” to propose the enslaved’s legally being free, is a mere uneasy “Let’s go back ober de ribber, Mars Dick” (121). As a last resort, young Owens, the text suggests,Footnote 6 pays locals to abduct Grandison while sound asleep on Niagara’s shore. Dick’s last view of Grandison before setting out for his journey home is “the familiar form of his servant stretched out on the ground, his face to the sun, his mouth open sleeping the time away oblivious alike to the grandeur of the scenery, the thunderous roar of the cataract, or the insidious voice of sentiment” (122).

At this point, Chesnutt’s story portrays an enslaved African American’s relation to Niagara that seems almost diametrically opposed to Douglass’s openly revering perspective. Here is an individual apparently perfectly unimpressed by Niagara’s sublime nature; Grandison is depicted as “turning his eyes away from the grand and awe-inspiring spectacle that lay close at hand, […] looking anxiously toward the inn where his master sat cursing his ill-timed fidelity” (122). Looking after the master appears to negate the capacity of recognizing and appreciating the beauties of (sublime) nature. In representing a denial of visual and aural contact as a sign of Grandison’s supposed obliviousness to the magnificence of Niagara as well as a human urge for freedom, Chesnutt’s text, on the one hand, echoes a racialized antebellum discourse that categorically excluded African Americans from representing Niagara Falls—and non-human nature generally—in terms of the sublime.Footnote 7 Reaching back to Jefferson’s infamous claim that there was “no poetry” in blacks, this longstanding violent discourse insinuated not only a black body and mind’s incapacity of “culture” and “civilization,” but by extension also of “cultured” or “civilized” perceptions of nature, a view that is entangled with the Colonel’s “faith in sable humanity” as an “obedient” race in need of guidance (126). On the other hand, it is exactly this notion that Chesnutt’s story exposes in its falseness by presenting an unforeseen plot development: after his abduction (or perhaps better, in light of Chesnutt’s ambivalence, his “disappearance”) at Niagara, Grandison initially returns to the South only to escape with his entire family to Northern territory three weeks later. The story ends with a first-rate deception of a slaveholder; Colonel Owens first rejoices in the (supposed) “rescue” of Grandison from abolitionists, only to shake “his fist impotently” at a band of fugitives aboard a steamboat headed for Canada in the closing scene (125; 127).

Chesnutt’s narrative strategy both undermines the knowledge of the master and suggests a hidden knowledge of the enslaved that, in this text, centrally involves Niagara’s nature. The story’s play with the masters’ and the enslaved’s knowledge works via creating a specific relation between the text’s levels of discours and histoire. On the level of discours, Chesnutt employs a voice that appears to be omniscient yet turns out to be limited as it focalizes solely through the master’s perspective. As readers encounter a heterodiegetic narrative voice that sounds reliable and objective, also because it seemingly satisfies (yet eventually mocks) generic conventions of the romance and the plantation tradition (cf. Cutter 51–53), they are tricked into perceiving the story exclusively from the point of view of Colonel Owens and his son. On the level of histoire, however, the last turn of events marks the existence of a knowledge of the enslaved that has been there all along but has remained veiled and silenced so far. In perplexing ways, it becomes clear to readers only in the end that Grandison was pursuing an ingenious scheme all along, as he could not bear leaving his family enslaved. Neither was he afraid of contact with abolitionists, whom he probably collaborated with in New York and Boston (possibly even earlier) to engineer collective liberation, nor did he feel contented in slavery. And by no means, Chesnutt implies, did he feel oblivious to the nature of Niagara, which is revealed as a significant place at last: here, Grandison for the first time gains the legal freedom that he envisions not only for himself but employs for attaining collective freedom for his extended family. Thus, Grandison’s escape, on the plot level, not only complicates passing into freedom as more than a binary, legal matter, but also highlights a broader epistemological conflict at the heart of the text and reveals what Chesnutt actually has to say, namely that antebellum masters—and those late-nineteenth-century readers who take their perspectives to be objective and reliable—have a very limited point of view and know only one side of the story. The other side is a hidden knowledge of (formerly) enslaved blacks that, through a narrative technique that involves the tricksterism of Chesnutt’s narrator as much as that of his titular character, suddenly bursts into visibility through a last turn of events and an ambivalent moment on Niagara’s shores.

In “The Passing of Grandison,” Niagara Falls therefore figures as a meaningful liminal space between bondage and freedom that emphasizes the intricate nature (in a double sense) of Emancipation precisely because it is not visible as such from the perspective of the oppressor whose assumed dominance the story echoes through its focalization. It is significant, however, that Chesnutt’s text, by not addressing Niagara Falls through Grandison in the vocabulary of the sublime, goes beyond demonstrating a one-sidedness and inadequacy of the master’s knowledge, as it becomes complicit in hiding Niagara and its meaning and reflects the strategic veiling of Niagara as part of the secret network known as the Underground Railroad through its form. Eventually, it is in large part because Grandison went to Niagara and cunningly employed its hidden meanings and beauty that his escape becomes possible. Niagara is what helps open up his flight space and enables making arrangements for a collective flight, as “the underground railroad seemed to have had its tracks cleared and signals set for this particular train” (126).Footnote 8 The story is thus not only a prime example of how Chesnutt sought to realize his famous dictum to strategically “accustom the public to the idea” of racial equality (Chesnutt, Journals 140), but also becomes what Lawrence Buell calls an “environmental text” not by overt description of Niagara as sublime nature but by subversively ascribing central meaning to this place (cf. Imagination 6–8). Niagara Falls figures indeed “not merely as a framing device but as a presence that begins to suggest that human history is implicated in natural history,” yet it does so precisely because that “presence” is not openly described from Grandison’s perspective in conventional terms or aesthetic frameworks such as the sublime (7). Paradoxically, Chesnutt’s text signifies through a strategic silence on a hidden African American knowledge about Niagara’s nature.

I begin with these two examples, representatives of a broader nineteenth-century African American tradition of writing about Niagara,Footnote 9 because they point to a host of broader questions that are central to this book, questions such as: how did nineteenth-century African American writers relate not only to Niagara but to the non-human natural world more generally? By what means did writers express relationships with non-human nature in a (written) literary tradition that emerged in the context of racial slavery and racialized discourses of “nature” and the “human” that sought to exclude them from the realm of the latter? Which aesthetic modes were employed, which literary spaces and tropes engaged, created, or transformed? How and where did the African American literary tradition, in other words, create its own places and patterns through which writers articulated and intertextually developed epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic ideas about and relations to nature, and how can we make those places and patterns visible?

Raising such questions, Douglass’s and Chesnutt’s Niagara writings help clarify the scope and aims of Environmental Knowledge, Race, and African American Literature as they represent the time frame and (some of) the kinds of material considered, and suggest how I wish to understand my primary texts and their engagements with the non-human natural world. First, they reflect the breadth of narrative texts considered in this study both historically, as they correspond with its two main parts on the antebellum period (Part I) and the latter decades of the nineteenth century (Part II), and with respect to treating material ranging from understudied texts (such as Douglass’s manuscript) to well-known ones (such as Chesnutt’s story). In Part I, I turn to antebellum African American writing (pamphlets, fugitive slave narratives) to sketch foundations of an African American environmental knowledge in a broader discourse analytic manner. Part II proceeds in a slightly different way by considering texts of the post-Emancipation era, in order to spotlight how writers like Charlotte Forten, William Wells Brown, Booker T. Washington, and Charles W. Chesnutt “signified” (Gates) on foundational African American environmental knowledge to articulate their ideas about the future of African America. Through material ranging from fugitive slave narratives and pamphlets, to a mid-nineteenth-century journal, autobiography, and fiction, this book suggests new places for recovering an African American ecoliterary tradition as well as some lines along which such a tradition developed, in order to provide new directions and input for further research in both ecocriticism and African American studies. While ecocriticism (still) needs to further expand its canon (and it is my belief that African American literature and literary theory will have to play a vital role in this), this study also demonstrates how African American studies may benefit from ecocritical approaches to uncover new facets of canonical and find value in understudied texts in ways that at the same time do not draw attention away from central issues of race and social justice.

Second, Douglass’s and Chesnutt’s texts hint at how I view the primary texts treated in this study in the context of what could broadly be called the relation between (racial) politics and nature. Some of the general problems of reading African American literature from an environmentally oriented perspective have to do with the ways in which, from an African American studies perspective, writing about nature has oftentimes been taken either as a trivial or accommodationist form of art that directed attention away from the issue of racial justice, while, from an (often still too “white”) ecocritical perspective, ideas about what counts as environmental writing have left something of a suspicion against too “politically oriented” texts that (over-)emphasize trauma or alienation from nature at the expense of its appreciation. By contrast, Douglass’s and Chesnutt’s Niagara writings, like the other texts I consider in this study, reveal that nineteenth-century African American writing was often both (a form of) nature writing as well as political writing. Douglass’s antebellum critique of the sublime as well as Chesnutt’s late-nineteenth-century play with racialized perspectives both celebrate Niagara’s non-human nature in its own right and simultaneously expose and employ a strategic potential of writing about the non-human natural world. While paying close attention to forms of alienation stemming from the traumatic experiences of slavery or racism and to the ways in which they shaped writing about non-human nature, my treatment of the texts in this study therefore aims to show the many things nineteenth-century black writing about nature could be: it could be just that, a form of nature writing; it could be a vehicle for political thought; or it could be (as I found in most cases) both, in intricate ways adding strategic dimensions to environmental literary discourse. Accordingly, one important objective of Environmental Knowledge, Race, and African American Literature is not to read African American texts as concerned either with “race” or with “nature” (or as “natureless” or “raceless”). Rather, this book is driven by the perceived need to overcome such either-or thinking patterns, which, at a closer look, have more to do with (thereby potentially exclusionary) (eco)critical traditions than with an African American literary tradition itself. More often than not, the texts I consider do not envision depicting nature and writing about race as “competing” issues, but emphasize their importance as intertwined aspects that inform one another.

To achieve my aims of spotlighting places of environmentally oriented writing in nineteenth-century African American narrative literature and offering new directions for both ecocriticism and African American studies, the six thematic chapters of this book explore nineteenth-century African American writing through the lens of “environmental knowledge.” I combine ecocritical, Foucauldian, and African American literary theory, in particular Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s concept of signifying, to trace foundations and transformations of such knowledge in a literary tradition that, for a long time, has not been read as significantly concerned with nature, and that may not easily be read as “environmental” when looking through a traditional ecocritical lens. As one of the pioneering ecocritical studies on African American literature, Kimberly K. Smith’s African American Environmental Thought (2007), puts it: “We may not discover a black Thoreau—nor should we expect to” (4). The latter part of the phrase is illuminating in the context of this project, in the sense that my research through the lens of environmental knowledge has been driven by an impulse not to “expect” an African American literary tradition that would be easily identifiable as “environmental” in a conventional sense. How could we possibly assume that a nineteenth-century African American literary tradition would use frameworks, concepts, or genres commonly associated with environmental writing in the same way as mainstream writers, if such frameworks, concepts, and genres were intertwined with the culture that produced the violent de-humanizations that formed the backbone of slavery and racism?

To contribute to refuting the idea that this by extension means that there was no environmental literary tradition or that there is something of a “deficit” in this respect in nineteenth-century African American writing is the overall aim of this book. For this, Environmental Knowledge, Race, and African American Literature proposes to change the perspective, read against the grain, look with a difference. It proposes, to use Camille T. Dungy’s words, to “change the parameters of the conversation” in order to fulfill the imperative task of “bring[ing] more voices into the conversation about human interactions with the natural world” (xxi), by reading through the lens of environmental knowledge. The Niagara-texts by Douglass and Chesnutt, for example, highlight that an ecocritical reading of nineteenth-century African American literature must pay close attention to how writers strategically signified on dominant environmental literary modes and rhetoric, and must take into account how African American literature may speak environmentally with a difference, through silences, forms of strategic veiling, through what is at times half-hidden. It must ensure, in other words, a critical distance that allows for going beyond traditional ecocritical models and concepts in order to discover alternative African American frameworks, places, and patterns for expressing relations to non-human nature. To play with Toni Morrison’s succinct phrase from Playing in the Dark (1992), such an approach must “romance the green shadows” of this literary and cultural tradition to uncover literary African American environmental knowledge.Footnote 10 If Morrison has proposed “reading black in white,” in the sense of tracing a Euro-American literary tradition for a subversively hidden Africanist presence, this book suggests ways of “reading green in black.” It explores an African American writing tradition for literary forms of environmental knowledge shaped by the history of race, mainstream environmental writing traditions, and distinctly African American forms of expression and intertextuality.

Foucauldian Environmental Knowledge

Environmental Knowledge, Race, and African American Literature breaks new ground by employing Foucauldian theory to offer an alternative ecocritical perspective on nineteenth-century African American literature. Apart from using specific concepts such as heterotopia or panopticism, and tracing an environmental consciousness in nineteenth-century African American literature through Foucauldian dimensions, a Foucauldian ecocritical approach is rooted in a set of general premises. I want to slow down for a moment to briefly introduce these by providing a definition of “environmental knowledge.” In the context of this book, “environmental knowledge” means such formations of power-knowledge that negotiate and constitute the human in relation to its non-human non-discursive material conditions. Thus, three clarifications concerning terminology. Firstly, “environmental” in “environmental knowledge” is not to be confused with “environmental(ist)” in the sense in which the term is broadly used today. I do not mean to suggest, in other words, an African American “environmental(ist) activism” or “movement” for the period under consideration. Rather than that, I employ the term “environment/al” in its more general and more original sense of non-human and not humanly built material “surroundings” or “conditions.”Footnote 11

Secondly, “environmental knowledge” is not the same as what has sometimes been referred to as “indigenous” or “local” knowledge, that is, forms of knowledge that developed in response to specific regions or that were developed by a particular, largely homogeneous, group of people.Footnote 12 African American environmental knowledge did develop (and was expressed in the writing tradition) to a significant extent in response to specific locales in the New World, especially, as will be seen, in the context of the U.S. South. However, to think in this respect of an “indigenous” knowledge would not only be outright cynical to the extent that it refers to a forcibly displaced, enslaved, ethnically and culturally diverse diasporic group. Moreover, referring to African American environmental knowledge as “local” knowledge would falsely imply discursive formations and practices largely separated from broader contexts, when tracing African American literary environmental knowledge in this study in fact reveals that such knowledge emerged as an inter-discursive part of larger epistemological processes, exchanges and struggles around the question of what it means to be (or become accepted as) human.

Thirdly, and here is a core assumption of a Foucauldian ecocritical framework, it is crucial that the given definition of environmental knowledge does not speak of “non-human natural” but of “non-human non-discursive material” conditions. In other words, what I mean by “environmental knowledge” is not a “knowledge of nature,” although historically changing conceptions and discourses of “nature” are most often central to formations of environmental knowledge. Significantly, however, environmental knowledge in a Foucauldian sense turns to “nature/the natural” as an object of discourse analysis, not as a stable or positivistically knowable essence, although it does not deny the existence of such a (non-human, non-discursive material) essence and its “real” effects and mutual interactions with the discursive within knowledge formation. Hence, when referring in this study to “nature,” I do not mean an absolute or stable entity but a discursive category, a signifier that has fulfilled historically changing functions within the production of forms of power-knowledge of the human in relation to its non-human non-discursive material conditions. Such a perspective is particularly valuable in the context of African American culture, where environmental dimensions of the writing tradition have been shaped not only by articulating relations to various kinds of non-human non-discursive materialities but also by challenging harmful discourses that employed concepts of “nature” to devalue and dehumanize blacks.

In designating this use of central terms, I am drawing from insights of scholarly work over the past decades that has increasingly come to recognize the potential of Foucauldian theory for environmental thought. For some time, environmentally oriented scholars tended to perceive Foucault not only as impracticable, but also as problematic, as too radically constructivist and denying agency through the idea of the “death of the subject.” An anthropocentric stance of Foucault’s analytics, the general hostility towards poststructuralist and postmodernist theory in early ecocriticism, and the fact that Foucault was “far from being an environmental thinker” and mentioned environmental concerns only marginally,Footnote 13 are some of the main reasons for this traditionally problematic relationship between Foucauldian and environmental thought (Alberts 544). The situation has somewhat changed over the past two decades, however, as environmentally oriented scholarship and ecocriticism have come to revalue once despised “high theory,” including Foucauldian thought. While pioneering work, for instance by Darier (1999), Goodbody (2009), and Alberts (2013) more generally proposes the usefulness of Foucault for environmental thinking, two classic Foucauldian concepts in particular have triggered responses from environmentally oriented literary and cultural critics, sociologists, and historians, namely “biopolitics” and “governmentality.” Studies by P. Rutherford (1994, 1999), Darier (1996), Luke (1997, 1999), Agrawal (2005), Bäckstrand and Lovbrand (2006), S. Rutherford (2007, 2011), and M. Smith (2011) have productively taken up this part of Foucauldian theory in the environmental humanities, while, in ecocriticism, Greg Garrard has suggested the rise of a “Foucauldian ecocriticism” (“Introduction” 2). By now, environmentally interested scholars across disciplines have begun to find their way with Foucault, especially with his “genealogical” work of the 1970s, recognizing that Foucault’s “concepts can be made highly relevant to environmental thinking, whatever attitude to ‘nature’ Foucault himself might have held” (Darier “Foucault” 6).

This recognition and body of scholarship have inspired my definition of “environmental knowledge” to the extent that using a Foucauldian lens in this study not only means thinking knowledge in terms of formations, discourse, and power, but also tracing the manufacturing of knowledge as multi-dimensional. Two insights captured in the notions of “non-discursive material” and “non-human” dimensions of environmental knowledge are particularly important at this point. First, there is the observation that the involvement of what we may call the non-discursive material dimension of the production, distribution, and circulation of knowledge was never irrelevant to, and, more importantly, never categorically denied in Foucauldian thought. Although there have been (mis-)perceptions along those lines, Foucault is not radically constructivist in this sense, as scholars such as Susan Hekman have suggested. Rather, as Hekman points out in The Materiality of Knowledge (2010), Foucault in many of his studies “far from emphasizing discourse to the exclusion of the material or ‘reality,’ is, on the contrary, always acutely aware of the interaction between discourse and reality” (48).Footnote 14 True, one of the premises of Foucault’s analytics is that we cannot analyze and historicize knowledge manufacturing apart from discourse. However, this does not automatically mean a denial of the interrelations between the discursive and the non-discursive material within processes of knowledge formation. This is especially true, if we take seriously Foucault’s emphasis on the ways in which discourse, in an imagined primal state (cf. “Order” 66), was fundamentally marked by material threats as an “action situated in a bipolar field of sacred and profane, lawful and unlawful, religious and blasphemous,” i.e. as a material “gesture charged with risks” (“Author” 124). In its imagined Urzustand, the discursive has always been seen as emerging within and in relation to “really” existing external, non-discursive materialities that could be as much as life threatening, and there is no indication of Foucault’s ignoring of such materialities in his genealogical work on specific bodies of knowledge, e.g. regarding the penal system or sexuality. A Foucauldian analysis of knowledge therefore always turns to both the discursive and the non-discursive material.Footnote 15

A second important insight is that this implies the possibility of recognizing non-human dimensions of knowledge formation. While a discursive dimension of knowledge formation pertains to the realm of the human—speaking of a “human knowledge” would be tautological from a Foucauldian perspective—a non-discursive material dimension within a Foucauldian-inspired framework potentially involves both the human and the non-human. On the one hand, there are human non-discursive materialities interacting with the discursive in the production of knowledge, which can be traced through political, economic or institutional events and the human body to the “material reality” of the human product discourse itself, as “a thing pronounced or written” (“Order” 52). On the other hand, the non-human non-discursive material dimension, too, becomes a potential, intersecting part of knowledge formation, as it figures in events such as non-anthropogenic catastrophes or disasters (e.g. the breakout of the plague, cf. Discipline 195–199), or, more generally, in the conditions provided by non-human surroundings including what we would commonly refer to as “nature.” In both cases, the relations between the discursive and the non-discursive material as well as the human and the non-human are regarded as mutually constitutive within the process of knowledge formation (implying that the modern “human” itself is not regarded as an essence); Foucault posits their relation as neither one of determination nor of expression. Therefore, even if a discourse analysis works from the premise that one may only access formations of knowledge via discourse, its aim can also be to trace forms of the non-human non-discursive material in the production of a knowledge surfacing in this discourse. When read not as a radical constructivist or relativist but as “a contextualist of the statements of observers of ‘objective reality,’” Foucault has the potential to enable an analytics that aims to identify interdependencies between the discursive and the non-human non-discursive material (Darier, “Foucault” 10).

In this sense, a Foucauldian framework of environmental knowledge represents a form of what Ursula K. Heise calls a “weak constructionism” that “analyze[s] cultural constructions of nature with a view towards the constraints that the real environment poses on them” (“Hitchhiker’s Guide” 512). Foucauldian ecocriticism in this sense means, on the one hand, taking a step back to analyze “nature” not as the stable essence as which it has often been mobilized throughout history, but as a historically changing, functionalized signifier.Footnote 16 Environmental knowledge through Foucauldian concepts offers the means to analyze this signifier in its uses, implications, and multiple effects within the production of power-knowledge. On the other hand, analyzing environmental knowledge also means tracing the involvement of the non-human non-discursive material as a shaping force within the production of power-knowledge. Such a mode of analysis does not leave out what Hayles calls the “unmediated flux” (cf. “Common Ground” 53–54; “Simulations”), or what Morton conceptualizes as “the mesh” of interconnection that is “the ecological thought” (Ecological Thought 1). Instead, it critically addresses the complex networks unfolding between the signifier “nature” and the non-human non-discursive material conditions within the manufacturing of a power-knowledge that creates (rather than discovers) the modern human and that intersects with social constructions of race. In this sense, the concept of environmental knowledge bridges poststructuralist and ecocritical theory to provide a basis for a skeptical ecocritical project that recognizes the necessity of combining an investigation of “the connections between the making and evolution of nature and the making and evolution of the discourses and practices through which nature is historically produced and known” (Escobar 46). Within such a project, Foucault, after all one of the most influential critics of our modern “grand narratives of liberation” that first “created the conditions for ecological ‘crises,’” should not be missing (Darier, “Foucault” 19–20). Foucauldian thought, through a concept of environmental knowledge, offers productive “weak constructivist” analytical means, and can be one “promising theoretical ground from which to pursue the analysis of environmental literature in its relation to cultural and rhetorical traditions, on the one hand, and social as well as scientific realities, on the other” (Heise, “Hitchhiker’s Guide” 512).

Environmental Knowledge and Nineteenth-Century African American Literature

A Foucauldian ecocritical lens offers a perspective that is particularly valuable in the context of nineteenth-century African American literature, as it allows taking into account the intersections between discourses of nature, the human, and “(de)humanization,” elements of a violent U.S. racial history that are crucial from an African American perspective. Drawing on the concept of environmental knowledge, my research for this study has shown that a specifically African American environmental knowledge expressed in nineteenth-century black writing may be systematically described by focusing on three primary “dimensions”: the spatial, the visual, and the biopolitical. Both the discourses treated in Part I (fugitive slave narratives, pamphlets) and the texts I turn to in Part II in order to highlight a “signifying” tradition of environmental knowledge suggest that the spatial, visual, and biopolitical are central to developments within the black environmental literary tradition, and may be useful as tools for further research beyond the necessarily limited scope of this book.

The importance of these dimensions is also visible in Douglass’s and Chesnutt’s literary encounters with Niagara Falls. With respect to the spatial, for example, Chesnutt’s text is an instance that strategically plays with Niagara Falls’ subversive meanings as an underground space. Through its narrative technique, “The Passing of Grandison” not only mocks the slave master’s perspective, but also signifies on the Underground Railroad as a specific form of heterotopic, subversive literary space first created in the antebellum slave narrative that could function, as I will argue in Chap. 2, as a “loophole” for expressing environmental knowledge. Regarding the visual, Douglass’s note draws attention to the importance of literary-aesthetic modes as ways of “visualizing” non-human environments. Modes such as the sublime, the pastoral, or the picturesque, which involve viewing and describing non-human non-discursive materialities in particular ways and from specific positions, were denied or obliterated, adapted, transformed or expanded in diverse ways in nineteenth-century African American writing. Douglass’s “Niagara” gives an example of such a process when it appreciates Niagara’s nature in its own right, while strategically adding a social dimension to the supposedly universal sublime, and signifies on the position and visual and imaginative perspective of this mode by appending the altered perception of one formerly enslaved. With respect to the biopolitical, both Douglass’s and Chesnutt’s Niagara-writings draw attention to a particular position of the black body and written word. Douglass by revealing the sublime as a racially charged concept that normalized nature experience, Chesnutt by demonstrating the constructedness of a white master’s perspective that falsely assumes a black enslaved’s obliviousness to Niagara’s nature. In different ways, both writers emphasize how the fundamental idea of biopolitics of subdividing and structuring the body and life of human populations, involved the production of both racial and environmental knowledge. They imply, in other words, that knowledge of the human in relation to its non-human non-discursive material conditions had effects on the construction of race and vice versa.

By using the spatial, the visual, and the biopolitical as central critical lenses that help systematically describe some of those places in nineteenth-century African American literature where we find environmental knowledge, I take an explicitly Foucauldian approach that goes beyond what Greg Garrard, in his introduction to the Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism (2014), more generally calls a “Foucauldian ecocriticism” (“Introduction” 3).Footnote 17 While such explicitly Foucauldian approaches have been present in environmentally oriented scholarship for some time, a Foucauldian ecocritical perspective to my knowledge has not been taken in African American studies and in environmentally oriented work on African American literature and culture so far. The former, African American studies, has traditionally been critical, sometimes (understandably) hostile, towards Western high theory and poststructuralism, and has not extensively used Foucault.Footnote 18 As for the latter, environmentally oriented work on African American literature and culture, much of the existing scholarship that has emerged over the past two decades does not belong to ecocriticism in a narrow sense, but to the environmental humanities. A number of book-length historical and sociological studies like those by D. Taylor (2002), Proctor (2002), Carney (2001), Stewart (2002), Washington (2005), Glave and Stoll (2006), or Glave (2010), as well as a variety of contributions across areas as diverse as eco-musicology (Rosenthal (2006)), religious studies (Clay 2011; Holley 2005), or food studies (Covey and Eisnach 2009) have dealt with environmental issues in African American culture. I am no less indebted to such studies than to historical scholarship in African American studies on subjects ranging from the history of black seamen (e.g. Bolster 1997) to the role of steamboat workers (Buchanan 2004) or black labor history (Montrie 2008), for drawing attention to various aspects pertaining to environmental knowledge, even if my explicit literary focus differs from their broader historiographic approaches. The same holds true regarding the considerable amount of research on “environmental justice” and “environmental racism.”Footnote 19

The immediate scholarly context of Environmental Knowledge, Race, and African American Literature, however, is ecocritical work on African American literature. This steadily growing body of scholarship, located at the intersection between two academic fields, African American Studies and ecocriticism, often in conjunction with postcolonial studies,Footnote 20 has been responding productively to the admonition that “[e]cocritics who continue to resist or reject African American concepts as foreign to their concerns risk a hardening of their developing discourse into a reactionary and racist defense of an essentialized idea of nature” (Tidwell qtd. Wardi 14). The current convergence between both fields is enhanced by the “political” nature of both ecocriticism and African American Studies. While ecocriticism is driven by the conviction that “our most pressing current environmental problems come from systemic socioeconomic and cultural causes” (Conway et al. 3), African American studies is essentially shaped by its deep political “commitment to critique the relationship of race and power in America” (Davidson ix). As ecocritics “tie their cultural analysis explicitly to a ‘green’ moral and political agenda” (Garrard, Ecocriticism 3), and since African American studies “was meant to try to redefine what it means to be human, what it means to be modern, what it means to be American” (C. West 542), both fields have the potential to talk productively to each other.

Ecocritical work on African American literature, which had a forerunner in Melvin Dixon’s Ride Out the Wilderness (1987), continues to be driven by the observation that “literary critics have largely overlooked African American literary traditions” (Ruffin 10). Forming only in the first decades of the twenty-first century, the field comprises by now a number of book-length studies (K. Smith 2007; Outka 2008; Finseth 2009; Ruffin 2010; Wardi 2011; Posmentier 2017; L. Johnson 2018; Claborn 2018; and Newman 2019), a pioneering essay collection (Mayer 2003), and a steadily growing number of scholarly articles (recently those by Beilfuss 2015; D. Anderson 2016; Volanth Hall 2018). In this expanding corpus, critics have come to address a variety of specific themes and regions, dealt with genres ranging from autobiography and fiction to poetry (cf. e.g. Dungy 2009; Shockley 2011; Posmentier 2017) and film (Monani and Beehr 2011), and with questions of teaching African American literature environmentally (Myers 2008; Haladay and Hicks 2010). Historically, much scholarship has focused on contemporary African American writing, e.g. by Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, or Alice Walker,Footnote 21 although there are also readings of nineteenth-century African American texts.Footnote 22 Initially designed to open up a once narrow ecocritical canon, and aiming to validate the existence of an engagement with environmental issues in African American writing, such studies have at times remained somewhat undertheorized. This tendency is, however, being overcome as the field diversifies, for instance, through work by Outka (2008), who uses trauma theory, L. Johnson (2018), who theorizes a “fugitive humanism,” or Claborn (2018), who combines an eco-historical method with Marxian ecology and intersectional ecocriticism.

While standing in this tradition of methodological diversification and drawing extensively from the insights of such scholarship, this book departs from previous studies in several ways. Beyond using an alternative Foucauldian framework of environmental knowledge that aims to provide groundwork for a more systematic analysis of the nineteenth-century African American environmental literary tradition, I turn to a timeframe and corpus of primary texts that is different from those of previous studies, and engage critically with some of the dominant assumptions of the field. To begin, I have a focus on African American writing,Footnote 23 which sets the study apart from more comparative approaches like Outka’s, Finseth’s, and Newman’s.Footnote 24 Moreover, I consider a timeframe that differs from those of existing book-length ecocritical studies focusing on specifically African American environmental traditions like those by Posmentier and Claborn, which do not turn to the nineteenth century. With respect to those monographs that (partially) turn to the nineteenth century, I consider a more extensive period than Finseth, yet a more concise timeframe than Ruffin’s and Wardi’s broad surveys, or K. Smith’s, Outka’s, and L. Johnson’s studies, which also include chapters on the twentieth century. My aim is thus to combine an ecocritical re-assessment of canonical African American texts and authors with drawing attention to lesser-known writing and archival material and to highlight how foundational antebellum forms of African American environmental knowledge (Part I) were taken up and transformed within the nineteenth-century tradition (Part II).

Moreover, a focus on environmental knowledge bears the potential to complicate and refine some of the long-standing (eco)critical ideas regarding environmental dimensions of African American literature. One of these, for instance, is the notion, influentially put forward by Michael Bennett, “that the nature of slavery in the United States created the link between anti-pastoralism and African American culture that has been operative from Douglass’s day to our own” (195). Bennett reflects a more general claim articulated in both African American studies and ecocriticism that, since the pastoral was closely tied to images of the plantation that misrepresented slavery and de-humanized blacks, and since there is a traditional identification of blacks with the liberating potential of the city, the African American literary tradition is marked by an antipastoral impulse.Footnote 25 Although my rereading of the tradition through environmental knowledge does not dispute this assessment, it has the potential to somewhat challenge its universality and suggest an alternative terminology, as I examine literary aesthetic modes (including the pastoral) through the broader Foucauldian lenses of the spatial, the visual, and the biopolitical. Douglass’s note on Niagara, for instance, when taken as a material, bodily encounter and an expression of visual relations to Niagara Falls, makes clear that African American texts did not necessarily negate modes such as the sublime, but instead often problematized and signified on their validity while embracing their potential to consciously value natural environs whilst uttering social critique. If it would therefore be somewhat simplifying to speak of an “antisublime” with respect to Douglass’s depiction of Niagara, my readings (esp. in Chaps. 3 and 6) suggest that the same might be true for African American writers’ use of the pastoral, which, despite its entanglements with imagery of plantation slavery, was often strategized in complex and radical ways, and played an important role for the black environmental writing tradition.

Another feature of (some) ecocritical readings of African American literature that approaching the nineteenth-century part of the tradition through the lens of environmental knowledge potentially complicates is the assumption of an analogy or causality between the workings of racism and (African American) environmental alienation. Ruffin, for instance, speaks of “the coupling of racism and ecological alienation” (2), James suggests that “the legacies of trauma and injustice have attenuated African Americans’ connection to nature” (164), and Myers has claimed that “Euroamerican racism and alienation from nature derive from the same source and result in the joint and interlocking domination of people of color and the natural world” (Stories 15). While the intricate connection and mutual effects between racism and environmental alienation as such must be at the heart of a field that explores the complexities of non-human nature in an African American context, drawing a general analogy that implies a simple causality between the two veils more than it reveals. To suggest a “coupling” (Ruffin), a “same source” (Myers), or some other form of “double oppression” exerted by an exploitative Euro-American worldview is a valid observation at many points, but it neither adequately explains the complex processes at work in the intertwined U.S. American histories of race and relations to the environment, nor does it take into account the diversity of African American responses to non-human nature. An advantage of a deconstructive, historicizing Foucauldian genealogy in this respect is that it enables exploring this connection in a more fundamental way by understanding power relations as productive and looking for moments of writing about nature as moments of resistance and struggle rather than repression and hegemony. Tracing literary environmental knowledge in this book means to look through and beyond the repression of African American environmental knowledge in order to focus on the alternative forms and strategies of its articulation.

In Chesnutt’s story, for example, Grandison is, as the text eventually suggests, not oblivious to Niagara’s grandeur. Yet, to focus primarily on the repression of African American environmental knowledge by (over-)emphasizing a simple causality between racial oppression and black environmental alienation, repeats, from a critical perspective, what Chesnutt mocks through his narrative technique. To consider the story through the notion of a “same source” of racial oppression and African American environmental estrangement to some extent echoes the master’s heterodiegetic voice of Chesnutt’s story that negates both the humanity and environmental knowledge of his enslaved; it runs danger to overlook the subversive processes at work in Chesnutt’s and others’ articulation of environmental knowledge. Focusing overly on a causal link between racism and African American environmental alienation risks missing the central point Chesnutt makes—and the claim that lies at the heart of this book—namely that there indeed is a rich tradition of nineteenth-century African American environmental knowledge. This knowledge may have been hidden at times, but sometimes, as Chesnutt’s narrative tricksterism suggests, it was precisely its hidden-ness, the fact that the master’s perspective was blind to it, that was employed as a means of expression and resistance. By extension, this means that one must not turn solely to the master’s attempt to silence but instead trace the ways in which this attempt shaped the articulation of environmental knowledge in African American writing. In other words, one should not primarily understand the tradition as marked by a “lack” or “deficit” due to (white) oppression causing (black) repression, but as characterized by a “difference” in terms of strategies of expression.

Apart from outlining my diverging approach and corpus with respect to existing studies and some of the central claims of the field, a more general note on my selection of texts is in order. Obviously, there are a great many (narrative) texts and genres of the nineteenth-century African American tradition that—despite the breadth of my corpus as it is—could have been chosen (not to mention poetry or drama, which are not the focus of this study). While I do not wish to suggest that my choice of texts is in any way inevitable, I want to mention two guiding principles that have influenced the selection process, namely the chosen texts’ diversity and their ability to highlight some of the broader lines of development within the tradition.

First, the texts in this study were chosen for their diversity, their capacity to represent some of the breadth and richness of African American environmental writing of the period considered. In this sense, the high degree of variety that marks my corpus reflects the high degree of variety I encountered through my research with respect to the ways in which narrative texts depicted and related to non-human natural environments. The resulting diversity of the selected texts becomes visible on (at least) three levels. First, I have chosen to treat both texts firmly established in the canon (fugitive slave narratives by Douglass and Bibb, works by B.T. Washington and Chesnutt) as well as much lesser studied ones (those by Forten, W. W. Brown, or the pamphlets by Hosea Easton and John Lewis). To combine both well-read texts and writing obscure even among well-informed readers opens up the possibility to show not only how well-known texts may be read anew through alternative ecocritical lenses, but also to highlight the importance of (future) archival work to recover understudied material. Moreover, it enables me, for example in the case of Charlotte Forten’s journals, to address some of the long-standing, partly institutional, reasons for why certain texts have largely (but unduly) fallen out of consideration, and to exemplify how an ecocritical perspective might help recover and revalue underrepresented parts of the tradition. (Forten’s journals had for a long time only been available in an abridged edition that identified race as her single most important subject matter while leaving out ecocritically relevant parts of her writing. The history of such cases in particular demonstrates the importance of bringing together the fields of ecocriticism and African American studies, as there is much to learn from the combination.) Second, it is vital that my examinations demonstrate how African American writers articulated environmental knowledge through a variety of genres. While most will agree that it is reasonable to consider a formative genre like the fugitive slave narrative for tracing the development of African American environmental knowledge, it is my conviction that it is just as important to see how environmental knowledge found expression across generic boundaries, e.g. in journals, (short) fiction, or even early forms of black historiography (W. W. Brown). Of course, much more remains to be done in this respect, more than could possibly be accomplished in the pages of this study. Readers might ask about—and subsequent scholars will hopefully turn to—genres such as African American sea narratives, spiritual narratives, didactic writing by black women of the late nineteenth century like Frances Ellen Harper, Pauline Hopkins, or Anna Julia Cooper, or work by writers like Paul Laurence Dunbar or W.E.B. Du Bois (not to mention a rich (nature) poetic tradition). Third, it is critical to my approach that the chosen texts are diverse regarding their representation of a wide range of (environmental as well as social) conditions under which their authors articulated environmental knowledge. In this respect, I demonstrate that it was highly significant, for example, whether environmental knowledge was expressed in private (Forten) or in public (e.g. pamphlets), in generically highly circumscribed contexts (fugitive slave narrative), by an established writer (W.W. Brown), a race leader (Washington), or by an aspiring author (Chesnutt). That my material shows a host of different vantage points from which African Americans expressed relations to the non-human natural world is paramount, given that one goal of this study (and one advantage of a Foucauldian approach) is to stress the importance of the conditions under which environmental knowledge found expression through thoroughly contextualized readings.

A second criterion that has influenced my choice of texts is their ability to help demonstrate some of the interconnections that mark the nineteenth-century African American ecoliterary tradition. Apart from pointing to diverse places where nineteenth-century African American writers expressed environmental knowledge (and issuing a call for future research), another central goal of this study is to systematically identify broader lines of development to begin tracing what could be called, alluding to Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s influential concept, a tradition of “green signifying” in African American writing that involved both mainstream and black traditions. Although I have to note, again, that other material could have been (and will hopefully in the future be) included, it is my understanding that those texts and writers chosen for my close readings serve well for sketching out a systematic framework for tracing some of those developments and thus provide a useful starting point and directions for future research. To this end, I work with Gates’s idea of “signifyin(g),” also with the aim of providing an approach that links (Foucauldian) ecocritical and African American literary theory. Note here that I have been refraining from speaking of “African American ecocriticism,” primarily because I believe that the term (misleadingly) implies that ecocriticism and African American studies were truly conjoined in a combined effort or field. As of yet, however, this seems rarely the case, as African American studies are only beginning to pick up ecocritical concerns as extensively as desirable, while ecocritical studies at times seem to run danger of simply “applying” their theory to a new set of texts, therein neither taking into account the specificity of the black literary tradition nor the rich tools African American studies has to offer for analysis. From an ecocritical perspective, there is a vital need to realize that it is not just African American literature that “has much to tell us, if we pay close enough ecocritical attention” (Dodd, “Forum” 1095), but an African American literary criticism as well.

In this spirit, Environmental Knowledge, Race, and African American Literature combines its Foucauldian ecocritical approach with a twofold distinction based on Gates’s concept of “signifyin(g).” In his seminal The Signifying Monkey (1988), Gates famously described the principle of “signifyin(g)” as “repetition and revision, or repetition with a signal difference,” proposing that African American texts be read as “double-voiced in the sense that their literary antecedents are both white and black” (xxiv, xxiii). This notion of a double-voiced African American intertextuality implies two basic forms of “signifyin(g)” that are vital to tracing environmental knowledge and that can be demonstrated through the texts chosen for this study. On the one hand, African American writers repeated and revised dominant Euro-American environmental knowledge traditions—instances of this can be seen in Douglass’s adaptation and transformation of the sublime in my introductory example but also in the ways in which environmental knowledge of writers treated in this study signifies on aesthetic traditions like the pastoral, the picturesque or the georgic. On the other hand, writers repeated and revised African American environmental knowledge of their predecessors—authors discussed in the second part of this book like W.W. Brown or Chesnutt are just as exemplary in this respect as Chesnutt’s use of Niagara as part of the Underground Railroad, a central literary space through which antebellum slave narratives had articulated environmental knowledge.

Chapter Overview

Building on Gates’s idea, the two main parts of Environmental Knowledge, Race, and African American Literature trace antebellum foundations of African American environmental knowledge that often entailed signifying on Western traditions, and then turn to postwar transformations of African American environmental knowledge that worked centrally through “repetition and revision” within the African American literary tradition. Part I, “Foundations: Antebellum African American Environmental Knowledge,” explores emerging forms of antebellum African American environmental knowledge in the formative genre of the fugitive slave narrative and in pamphlet literature. Considering a broad range of canonical and lesser-known texts, I focus on the spatial, the visual, and the biopolitical, as foundational dimensions of African American environmental knowledge.

While narrators of the antebellum fugitive slave narrative often displayed a tendency to disjoin themselves from “nature” with which they were associated through racial discourse, the first two chapters demonstrate how the genre nevertheless found ways of expressing environmental knowledge. In Chap. 2, “Claiming (through) Space,” I read the Underground Railroad ecocritically as a “literary heterotopia” of the fugitive slave narrative that became vital to an African American spatial and environmental imagination, arguing that representations of Underground Railroad space could figure as a “discursive loophole” for articulating environmental knowledge via an otherwise confining genre. My selection of a wide range of (primary) texts in this chapter, ranging from abolitionist writing to slave narratives including those by Bayley (1825), Curry (1840), Douglass (1845), Bibb (1849), and J. Brown (1855), reflects my aim to trace a broader discursive functioning of the literary heterotopia of the Underground Railroad. I demonstrate that this literary heterotopia became a means of “claiming (through) space” in a twofold sense: First, it enabled fugitives’ reclaiming themselves through space, by reinterpreting relations between space and body, and by subversively playing with an antebellum popular discourse of the “Liberty Line.” Second, I show how this subversive play provided a means of claiming space in the sense of imagining a literary Underground Railroad space that could be employed to express African American environmental knowledge, which makes it an important object of study from an ecocritical perspective.

Chapter 3, “Resisting (through) the Eye,” turns to a mode, the pastoral, that is deeply connected with what may be seen as the opposite of heterotopic space, namely the normalizing, controlling space of the plantation, and to its problematic involvement in African American expressions of environmental knowledge. I employ the idea of a “strategic pastoral,” understood as such moments in which pastoral elements become part of a doubled (visual) perspective in slave narratives, to examine how this technique enables an articulation of environmental knowledge, social critique, and utopian hope. As in the first chapter, I use a variety of (con-)texts, here in order to sketch antebellum visual regimes and their relation to the emergence of the genre, but focus on two narratives in particular, those by Frederick Douglass (1845) and Henry Box Brown (1849). Through these texts, and using a basic distinction by Susan Snyder between “temporal” and “spatial” aspects of the pastoral, this chapter demonstrates where, how, and with what effects slave narratives strategized pastoral elements to express environmental knowledge and criticize racial slavery, and suggests an alternative framework for thinking about the pastoral in ecocritical readings of African American literature.

Chapter 4, “Negotiating (through) the Skin,” turns to antebellum African American pamphlets, a part of the tradition that is generally somewhat underrepresented in comparison with the fugitive slave narrative. Considering the ways in which antebellum black pamphleteers dealt with the pressing task of attacking stereotypes and racialisms that sought to “biologically” exclude the black body, I analyze how their strategies of writing against this “biological exclusion,” which often revolved around notions of “birth,” “blood,” and “nature,” could become another means for expressing environmental knowledge. While including well-known texts such as David Walker’s “Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World” (1829), I also focus in-depth on lesser-known pamphlets by Hosea Easton, John Lewis, and William Whipper, in order to draw attention to alternative lines within the tradition and to suggest their (and the pamphlet tradition’s general) relevance to ecocriticism.

The second part of Environmental Knowledge, Race, and African American Literature, “Transformations: African American Environmental Knowledge from Reconstruction to Modernity,” focuses on revisions of environmental knowledge in African American writing in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. Turning to slave narratives after slavery, fiction, and a journal, I show some of the ways in which post-Emancipation black writers signified on foundational forms of African American environmental knowledge, took up new models and modes for writing environmentally, and interacted with shifting epistemological contexts and racializing discourses. Part II does not seek to imply a simple teleology or progressive development, but spotlights various texts as instances that give an impression of the complexity and diversity of African American environmental knowledge. Nevertheless, the correspondence between the chapters of Part I and Part II also suggests a sense of continuity, demonstrating that the post-Emancipation part of the tradition often took up and transformed previously developed forms of environmental knowledge to articulate their ideas for the future of African Americans.

Chapter 5, “Transforming Space,” looks at Charlotte Forten’s journals, written mostly during the Civil War, and William W. Brown’s My Southern Home (1880), as indicating a broad reconfiguration of literary space in African American writing that offered new ways for expressing environmental knowledge. One significant effect of this reconfiguration, I argue, was that articulations of environmental knowledge shifted from “loopholes” like the slave narrative’s literary heterotopia of the Underground Railroad into broader literary spaces of education and home. In Forten, for instance, a writer-activist understudied in African American studies and not yet considered by ecocritics, we register a host of such spaces in her picturesque imagery of houses and schools, which become a means of creating an alternative discourse of nature as a multifaceted refuge that is also used to condemn slavery and racism. Brown’s My Southern Home, his traditionally least-studied book, on the other hand, is a more subversive trickster narrative that expresses relations to the non-human natural world by negotiating the ambivalent relationship of African Americans to the South. His place-based environmental knowledge is indicative of a postwar form of black agrarianism and an important element of Brown’s vision for a post-Emancipation America.

The last two chapters turn to Booker T. Washington and Charles W. Chesnutt, two canonical writers who are more and more included in ecocritical considerations, in order to highlight particular aspects of their work that become visible by reading their texts through the (Foucauldian) lens of environmental knowledge. In Chap. 6, “Transforming Vision,” I propose an alternative angle on two of Booker T. Washington’s autobiographies, Up From Slavery (1901) and the less famous sequel Working with the Hands (1904), to demonstrate some of the ways in which Washington’s post-Emancipation vision rests on (revised) forms of environmental knowledge and how this environmental knowledge interacts with contemporary evolutionary ideas. Washington’s environmental knowledge transforms the strategic pastoral of the fugitive slave narrative and introduces, in Working with the Hands, an African American georgic that seeks to root African American life and culture in dignified and communal forms of labor. Moreover, I suggest that his (pastoral and georgic) environmental knowledge is both part of his own evolutionism and a means of criticizing racist evolutionary ideas.

Chapter 7, “Transforming the Politics of the Black Body,” considers Charles W. Chesnutt’s Uncle Julius stories as texts that revise the black body as an environmental entity. I argue that stories such as “Po’ Sandy,” “Sis’ Becky’s Pickaninny,” or “The Gray Wolf’s Ha’nt” are expressions of a trans-corporeal (Alaimo) African American environmental knowledge and of Chesnutt’s broader philosophy of epistemological relations to the material world. Beyond showing how Chesnutt’s trans-corporeal environmental knowledge self-reflexively draws attention to the difficulties of depicting links between the black body and non-human nature, while emphasizing the empowering potential that lies in imagining this body environmentally, I suggest that his philosophy of environmental knowledge signifies on Herbert Spencer’s social evolutionary ideas. Chesnutt’s stories epistemologically resist Spencerism to offer a philosophical reflection on the possibilities and limits of environmental knowledge as such. In this respect, his stories are particularly rich and useful “environmental texts” (L. Buell) that are not only crucial within a nineteenth-century tradition of African American environmental knowledge, but more generally of interest to ecocritics as thought-provoking comments on the epistemological and ethical interrelations between race, discourses of nature, and the non-human non-discursive material.

The chapters on Washington and Chesnutt as well as my closing remarks on Obama’s 2009 visit of Yellowstone in the conclusion reflect how this study conceptualizes African American environmental knowledge. On the one hand, such knowledge emerges in specific, racialized epistemological contexts (scientific racism, Spencerism), which often violently mobilized discourses of “nature” and of the “human”; texts must be understood within broader histories of racial and environmental knowledge. On the other hand, the aim of this book is to demonstrate that there are distinct forms of African American environmental knowledge and characteristic lines of development within the nineteenth-century black literary tradition, as writers frequently signified on their predecessors. We find an interconnectedness through environmental knowledge within this tradition, which often celebrates yet also problematizes and strategizes relations to non-human non-discursive materialities, and which has effects up until today. A Foucauldian genealogy is, after all, a “history of the present,” and writing such a history of the present of African American literary environmental knowledge seems of importance if we want to improve our understanding of the relationship between race and relations to non-human nature. As ecocritics stress that environmental problems are social problems, and since there is much truth in Frantz Fanon’s claim that the “social constellation, the cultural whole, are deeply modified by the existence of racism,” African American writing is a critical place for investigating such problems more thoroughly (36). Rereading such writing through the lens of environmental knowledge may thus do more than enable scholars to rethink the black literary canon from a changed perspective and to spotlight alternative forms of environmental writing. Ultimately, going back to writers like Henry Bibb, Charlotte Forten, or Booker T. Washington—or exploring how Douglass and Chesnutt wrote about Niagara Falls—may also enhance our understanding of the social and cultural dynamics involved in the environmental crises the world faces today.