Race and Nature from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance (Signs of Race)

Drawing on theories of sublimity, trauma, and ecocriticism, this book examines how the often sharp division between European American and African American experiences of the natural world developed in American culture and history, and how those natural experiences, in turn, shaped the construction of race.

Winner of the 2009 Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment Biennial Prize for 'Best Book of Ecocriticism,' Race and Nature from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance examines a neglected but centrally important issue in critical race studies and ecocriticism: the issue of environmental racism. Paul Outka asks how natural experience became racialized in America from the antebellum period through the early twentieth-century and draws compelling new conclusions. Using theories of sublimity and trauma, the book offers a critical and cultural history of the racial fault line in American environmentalism that to this day divides largely white wilderness preservation groups and the minority environmental justice movement.

Front Matter....Pages i-xiii Introduction: The Sublime and the Traumatic....Pages 1-26 The Colonial Pastoral, Abolition, and the Transcendentalist Sublime....Pages 27-49 “Behold a Man Transformed into a Brute”: Slavery and Antebellum Nature....Pages 51-80 Trauma, Postbellum Nostalgia, and the Lost Pastoral....Pages 81-102 Trauma and Metamorphosis in Charles Chesnutt’s Conjure Tales....Pages 103-126 Strange Fruit....Pages 127-150 White Flight....Pages 151-170 Migrations....Pages 171-200 Coda: Prospects for an Antiracist Ecological Sublime....Pages 201-203 Back Matter....Pages 205-266