Ecologies of Racial Justice: A Roundtable

Ecologies of Racial JusticeChair: Janet Neary (Hunter College) Presenters:Stefanie Sobelle (Gettysburg College) Jeffrey Hole (University of the Pacific) Sarah Nance (US Air Force Academy) Andrew Hebard (Miami University of... [ view full abstract ]

Ecologies of Racial Justice

Chair: Janet Neary (Hunter College) 

Presenters:

Stefanie Sobelle (Gettysburg College) 

Jeffrey Hole (University of the Pacific) 

Sarah Nance (US Air Force Academy) 

Andrew Hebard (Miami University of Ohio) 

Rachel Linnea Brown (University of Kansas) 

Kara Thompson (College of William and Mary) 

In the climax of his famous 1857 speech on West Indian Emancipation, Frederick Douglass casts the political struggle for racial justice in terms of the natural order, likening political agitation to both agricultural labor and weather: “If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.” Five years earlier, in his 1852 treatise on “The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States,” Martin Delany draws on climate in non-metaphorical terms, asserting the advantageous environment in Central America—its healthy climate and geographic centrality—to make his case for New Granada (now Panama) and Nicaragua as ideal locales for the establishment of a black nationalist enclave outside the US: “In the first place, they are the nearest points to be reached, . . . In the second place, the advantages for all kinds of enterprise, are equal if not superior, to almost any other points—the climate being healthy and highly favorable.” Writing in the context of increased African American precarity in the wake of the Fugitive Slave Law, both men center the interdependence of “enterprise” and climate in their arguments for racial justice (Douglass’s for emancipation and Delany’s for black citizenship rights) to illustrate black self-determination as the natural order. Moreover, both men write with an awareness of the impact of slavery and other forms of labor exploitation on the global movement of people through various literal and political climates. 

At the end of the 19^th century/ beginning of the 20^th, Mary Austin, whose work focused on the deserts of the Southwest, engaged in a form of nature writing about entering into a community, a cooperation of creatures and climates, rather than finding oneself in the land: “Desert is a loose term to indicate land that supports no man, she writes in Land of Little Rain (1903): “whether the land can be bitted and broken to that purpose is not proven. Void of life it never is, however dry the air and villainous the soil.” Los Angeles’s controversial annexation of water in the Owens Valley, for example, which Austin later fictionalized in The Ford (1918), would have a devastating impact on the region and its various inhabitants. Austin, an activist working at the intersections of water rights, women’s rights, Native and Spanish American rights, increasingly understood land conservation to be inextricable from social justice. In an effort to address issues of ecology, race, and gender, Austin turned away from Anglo-European literary traditions toward Native American folklore and performance, which she understood as under threat of erosion. Native Americans were the true Americans, she believed, and she attempted to find in their stories and dances an “American” poetics that would draw from the land itself. 

Taking up these writers’ provocations to understand citizenship, slavery, labor, emancipation, emigration, and aesthetics in dynamic relation to the natural world, the papers in this roundtable address what we are calling ecologies of racial justice. In “Mary Austin’s Desert Poetics,” Stefanie Sobelle argues that while undeniably operating within an early Modernist vein of primitivism, Austin also brought an environmental perspective to the economic forces of colonization in the West and their impact on racial justice. In her paper, “How to Strike Gold in the Desert,” Kara Thompson employs the desert projections and deliberations of Michael Marder and Elizabeth Povinelli to examine climates of mid to late 19^th-century settler colonialism. Focusing on military and geological expeditions by Zebulon Pike and Ferdinand Hayden, Thompson shows how each projected onto the “desert” an affective settler-colonial logics that created conditions for westward settlement. In “Climates of ‘Health’ and the Racialized Body,” Sarah Nance examines privileged climates and locations of “health” in and around the work of Helen Hunt Jackson, interrogating the contradiction between her work on Native American policy reform and her climate-based preventative measures against tuberculosis, concluding that Hunt’s desire for racial justice in the form of political progress is at odds with the sovereignty of white bodily health. Taking up a number of first-hand accounts of settlement in the Midwest, Rachel Linnea Brown focuses on Robert Ball Anderson’s account of homesteading in Nebraska in the wake of the Timber Culture Act of 1873. She argues that although this homesteading initiative gave marginalized settlers like formerly enslaved Anderson the opportunity to identify as property-holding citizens, Nebraska’s “timber claims” also meant loss for Indigenous peoples. In his paper, “Draining the Swamp: W.E.B. DuBois and the Racial Ecology of the State,” Andrew Hebard examines the imbrication of two narratives of “draining the swamp” in DuBois’s The Quest of the Silver Fleece—the effort of freedpeople to purchase and reclaim swampland in the rural south in order to grow and sell their own cotton, and the more figurative use of the term signifying efforts of the protagonist to embark on a successful career as an administrator in the midst of a corrupt and racist political system. Hebard traces the ways that late 19^th- and early 20^th-century ecological thought and its use of statistics to model complex environments allowed Du Bois to re-imagine racialized institutions with different biopolitical possibilities than those that left African Americans vulnerable to violence. In his paper on William Grimes’s narrative, constitutive forms, and the law, Jeffrey Hole draws on ecological discourse to examine how Grimes imagined and gave expression to the racializing assemblages, juridical arrangements, and ineluctable networks that enforced boundaries of black life. In sum, this roundtable will open up a larger discussion about the ways in which such ecologies of racial justice are both shaped by and constituting particular environments.