Restoring the connection to the natural world : essays on the African American environmental imagination

Abstract

Since its emergence in the second half of the nineteenth century American environmentalism had predominantly been a white, middle-class pursuit, preoccupied with notions of wilderness and wildlife preservation. Only fairly recently, with the advent of the environmental justice movement in the 1980s, has American environmentalism broadened its definition of environment to include the concerns relevant to a community's way of living. Especially the concerns of poor urban communities of color, which have been exposed to environmental hazards disproportionately, have entered the political agenda. This volume - one of the first collections of ecocritical essays devoted exclusively to African American texts - shows that African Americans have contributed to the efforts of the environmental justice movement not only as political activists, but also as writers. The essays range from studies of nineteenth- century slave narratives to twentieth-century texts by Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Richard Wright, Charles Johnson, Toni Cade Bambara, Audre Lorde, and Octavia Butler. Employing a variety of theoretical and methodological premises, they provide insight into the texts' various conceptualizations of nature, culture, and humanness' and their implications for environmental ethics.

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