The year 2009 saw a somewhat quaint episode in Barack Obama’s presidency that hints at the timeliness of the issues and questions raised in Environmental Knowledge, Race, and African American Literature. In August 2009, the 44th U.S. President and his family took a trip to Yellowstone National Park and the Grand Canyon. At first glance, this may not seem in any way extraordinary or noteworthy. Obama was only continuing a long tradition of American leaders visiting Yellowstone and, more generally, the vast natural sites, parks, and resources of the nation in a publically visible manner. What was peculiar in this case, however, was how the announcement of the Obama’s trip soon triggered an echo across media that was bent on the question whether the first family was actually going to be camping outside, in the wilderness. Especially after White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, on a press conference held during the visit, confirmed such speculations to be true, acknowledging that Obama had “always tremendously enjoyed being outside,” and expanding, more specifically, on his fascination with “fly-fishing,” a whole array of responses emerged. While some voices began to caricature the idea of the President’s standing on top of the Grand Canyon gazing down into its depth by drawing analogies to his staring at the debts of his financial politics, most of the evolving discussions involved mildly amused imaginings and comments on Obama’s (apparently rather unsuccessful) fishing endeavors: Gibbs had informed the journalists that “he was dying to do that, and finally got the chance to do that, though was a bit frustrated he didn’t get to hold one of the fish.”Footnote 1

What became perceivable throughout the exchange was how deeply unfamiliar the image of Obama, and of African Americans generally, sharing “the outdoors and some of the beautiful places in the country” seemed to be (Gibbs). On the internet, comments drew attention across blogs to the oddness of the idea, sometimes in connection with statistics documenting a lack of African American visitors to U.S. National Parks, and asking, to quote one representative blogger: “As Obama goes camping, why don’t more blacks do the same?” (qtd. James 176). Responses thus reveal, as Jennifer James suggests, that camping is “a racially loaded signifier which points to the reification of spatial imaginaries in discussions of blacks and nature” (176). They also point, by extension, to another underlying question that involves a paradoxical tension, namely why and how it is, that the first black U.S. President was much less expected to enjoy nature than his predecessor in office. Why was Obama, after all well known for his political “greenness,” felt to be much less capable of connecting to nature than George W. Bush, Jr., who could pull off the nature man through iconic images that showed him playing with his dogs on a Texas farm whilst cancelling the Kyoto protocol? Why was there apparently something odd in imagining Obama in nature, fly-fishing?

In a sense, Environmental Knowledge, Race, and African American Literature can be read as a dive into the long-standing history behind this question through the African American writing tradition; I have investigated some of the cultural roots connected to the surprise and wonderment that also became visible in responses to Obama at Yellowstone. What has been seen in this investigation is that an African American literary and cultural tradition was by no means oblivious to non-human non-discursive materialities, even though its modes of expression may not fit dominant narratives of “nature’s nation.” African American literature has a long nineteenth-century tradition of environmental knowledge that was decisively shaped by the violent histories of slavery, race, and other, more dominant forms of environmental knowledge of the period considered. There may not be a “black Thoreau” (Smith 4), yet a closer look through the dimensions of the spatial, visual, and biopolitical shows that nineteenth-century African American literature holds a rich environmental knowledge and that it developed its own places and patterns for such knowledge. Non-human non-discursive materialities figured as loopholes, refuges, or rewards; environmental knowledge was written through modified frameworks of the pastoral, the sublime, or the picturesque. Thus, there are no doubt many “environmental texts” (L. Buell) in this particular part of American literature as well. African American literature was never marked by a “lack” or “deficiency” in terms of writing about the human in its relation to non-human non-discursive material conditions, even though this has not traditionally been recognized in U.S. mainstream culture, as considering the wonderment at Obama’s attempt at fly-fishing suggests. In other words, if Obama’s going into the wilds was perceived as odd, this is not because he and his family did something that was strikingly extraordinary in light of an African American cultural tradition, but because this tradition and its diverse forms of relating to and writing about nature has long been overlooked. To be sure, in order to see this, one has to “reverse the optics” of reading as I have suggested by alluding to Morrison’s approach in Playing in the Dark, since the conditions under which African American environmental knowledge developed were (also) marked by the violent histories of slavery and race. It is necessary to read with a changed perspective that extends beyond traditional ecocritical frameworks in order to make visible an often strategically used, sometimes hidden environmental knowledge of the black literary tradition.

By demonstrating how this African American environmental knowledge signified on both black and white traditions, Environmental Knowledge, Race, and African American Literature not only contributes to ecocritical work on African American literature, but also speaks more broadly to the scholarly fields of African American studies and ecocriticism, which it seeks to interlink more thoroughly. First, and with respect to the immediate scholarly context of this book, a Foucauldian perspective that reads through the lenses of the spatial, the visual, and the biopolitical, may help further explore environmental dimensions of African American texts of the period I have considered and beyond. With respect to the nineteenth century, one might turn to black spiritual autobiographies, to fiction writers such as Paul Laurence Dunbar or Frances Ellen Harper, or expand the focus to drama or poetry. Regarding other timeframes, much ecocritical work has been done in the recent past, for instance in studies by Posmentier (2017) or Claborn (2018). Nonetheless, it seems fruitful to further contextualize their findings as well as literary works like W.E.B. Du Bois The Quest of the Silver Fleece, Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923), or Zora Neale Hurston’s fiction in the broader context of an African American environmental knowledge that developed in the nineteenth century.

Moreover, my readings show that the assumption of an overwhelming antipastoralism in African American literature ignores the diversity of responses to, and uses of the pastoral in black letters. Even with respect to the slave narrative, the label “antipastoral” does not fully capture the complexities of the engagement with the pastoral as a literary mode. This is not to say that Bennett’s claim of an African American antipastoralism is false if one understands “antipastoral” more broadly in the sense of “anti-nature.” Outka, in this respect, validly classified the slave narrative as “anti-nature writing, the enactment of, and proof of, the author’s disconnection from nature, from the bestial and the field” (Outka 58). In my reading, both of these ideas describe what I have termed, after Val Plumwood, an impulse of “hyper-separation” that no doubt marks the genre and antebellum African American literature more generally, and that sometimes leads to a literary antipastoralism. Nevertheless, Environmental Knowledge, Race, and African American Literature also reveals that there were ways to express an environmental knowledge via the “loophole” of the Underground Railroad and through a double-eyed pastoral in the slave narrative that is much more complex than the term “antipastoral” suggests.

The shortcomings of the idea of an overwhelmingly antipastoral African American literary tradition become even clearer when considering the implications of my readings concerning the postwar period. During Reconstruction and Post-Reconstruction, when African American writing increasingly began to turn to themes and spaces of education and home, the pastoral itself became involved in the act of hyper-separation. If hyper-separation, in the slave narrative, had meant a general tendency towards omitting descriptions and discourses of “nature,” many postwar writers, although guided by the same hyper-separating impulse to move into “civilized” humanity, recognized the pastoral as well as the picturesque as “domesticizing” modes that could function as the sign of “civilization.” Creating discourses of “pastoral nature” or “picturesque nature” therefore followed the same imperative to become “civilized” through hyper-separation. As shown, both modes figured prominently in writing that focused on education and home, for instance, in Charlotte Forten’s or William Wells Brown’s valuations of the rural over the city, or in Booker T. Washington, who hyper-separated and moved “up from slavery” precisely by claiming the pastoral as the reward, the mark of his “cultivation” and “civilization.” In this respect, it is also telling that the (traumatic) wilderness narrative that had its roots in the heterotopia of the Underground Railroad largely disappeared at the time when the pastoral became a sign of achieving humanity. In any case, such observations question the existence of an overwhelming antipastoralism in the black literary tradition for the period treated in this study.

Secondly, it is my hope that my readings more broadly suggest how productive exchanges and interlinkages between ecocriticism and African American studies may become. On the one hand, ecocriticism may benefit greatly from treating African American texts through more interaction and exchange with African American literary criticism. As the use of Gates’s concept of signifying demonstrates, ecocritics who turn to African American writing should embrace the expertise and alternative models that African American studies has long brought to interpreting the tradition and employ concepts such as “signifying” or “double consciousness” more centrally. On the other hand, African American literary criticism may find new themes and dimensions in the black literary tradition by incorporating ecocritical concepts and perspectives. When recalling that the field of African American studies has at times overlooked no doubt existing environmental dimensions, sometimes simply by referring to abridged editions as in the case of the Billington-edition of Forten’s Journals (Chap. 5), it seems a rewarding task to reread texts anew against previous interpretations that were traditionally focusing on the issue of race. This is not to suggest drawing attention away from this issue, but rather to move on to considering the interrelations between race and environmental knowledge. The two, black writers themselves often imply, cannot be thought apart.

Thirdly, and beyond the immediate scope of this book, an explicitly Foucauldian perspective as employed in Environmental Knowledge, Race, and African American Literature may be another fruitful mode of analysis for ecocriticism more generally. If taking Foucauldian thought not as radically constructivist but instead as one strand of a “weak constructionism” (Heise), a Foucauldian ecocriticism could become a means not only of finding and describing new environmental texts, but also of further exploring links between race, environmentalism, and discourses of nature. If Buell, in his preface to The Future of Environmental Criticism, alludes to W.E.B. Du Bois’s famous prediction of the “problem of the color line” to suggest that an ultimately still more pressing twenty-first century question could “prove to be whether planetary life will remain viable for most of the earth’s inhabitants,” exploring environmental knowledge may be one productive way of analyzing the long history of intersections between both issues (vi). A Foucauldian ecocriticism offers ways to write this history, which seems an essential task in the age of the Anthropocene and at a time of global environmental crises and continuing racism. If we require “a climate of transformed environmental values, perception, and will” (Buell, Future vi), environmentally rereading cultural histories like that of African America can help working towards such a transformed climate. In other words, to critically think about and historicize why it apparently felt so odd for many Americans that Obama goes fly-fishing may be part of the solution of broader environmental and social problems.