The Body

Nineteenth-century Americans believed that material environments could modify bodies: they conceived of their corporeal, emotional, and even vocational realities as porous to the air, soil, and water around them. Importantly,... [ view full abstract ]

Nineteenth-century Americans believed that material environments could modify bodies: they conceived of their corporeal, emotional, and even vocational realities as porous to the air, soil, and water around them. Importantly, these were not homogenizing or equalizing forces. The 19^th-century environment and the 19^th-century body existed not as stable, concrete entities but as highly local, contingent, and variable. White residents thus saw myriad bodily dangers lurking in the environments surrounding them, dangers not only to their health but also to the stabilizing signifier of whiteness. And black residents saw the attendant dangers of this perceived destabilization while at the same time resisting its foundations, which necessitated white dehumanization of black bodies and accompanying justifications for black enslavement.

This seminar paper provides context and evidence for these assertions, outlining why “the body” is a keyword for 19^th-century environmental humanities (EH). I argue that we cannot understand how our subjects imagined their bodies without talking about the relationships of those bodies to their environments, and we cannot understand 19^th-century environments without talking about human bodies living with them. Attending to the body in the 19^th century enables us to better contextualize the roots of critical issues in 21^st-century EH, including human-animal relations, environmental health and toxicity, indigeneity and coloniality, and environmental and social justice. My paper traces a genealogy of ideas about the body to show that our contemporary EH innovations, including such important concepts as transcorporeality, new materialism, and environmental racism, are rooted in these 19^th-century ideas about embodiment.