Reconstruction 7.2 (2007)
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Restoring the Connection to the Natural World: Essays on the African American Environmental Imagination . Ed. Sylvia Mayer. Münster: LIT-Verlag, 2003. ISBN: 978-3825867324.
<1> In her introduction to The Ecocriticism Reader from 1995, a landmark in the short and dynamic development of this new field of knowledge, Cheryl Glotfelty anticipated that "Ecocriticism has been predominantly a white movement. It will become a multi-ethnic movement when stronger connections are made between the environment and issues of social justice, and when a diversity of voices are encouraged to contribute to the discussion" (Glotfelty 1996, xxv) . The collection of essays reviewed here, published in 2003, fills this gap in ecocritical research. The nine contributors to Sylvia Mayer's edition have critically evaluated various aspects of African American literature and brought ecocritical theories and critique into dialogue with historical as well as contemporary texts. Although the essay collection has been published eight years after Glotfelty's visionary demand and, meanwhile, academic work has been done regarding African American and other multicultural concepts of literature, culture and the environment, Mayer's essay collection constitutes a longed-for furthering of this debate, especially in the European arena.
<2> In her "Introduction," Sylvia Mayer contextualizes the debate about ecocriticism and the special contribution of African American perspectives and writings to this field. She d elineates the necessity to integrate those perspectives into the fast-growing field of ecocriticism in order to further the development of this relatively young critical current.
<3> In their individual ways, the nine following essays attempt to answer the question why African Americans were largely excluded or neglected by ecocriticism, pointing out the interrelation between environmental and social injustices in the USA from the beginning to the present day. In answer to this question, it is Christa Grewe-Volpp who draws attention to the historical definition of humanity, culture and civilization as purely white concepts, leaving out all other races and aligning them with the non-human and with wilderness. The strong concern with environmental justice points at the historical genesis of ecocritical thinking by its close relations to the civil Rights movement and the later symbiosis of social justice activism and environmental protest against the either careless or profit-inspired destruction and pollution of the environment.
<4> The contributors use quite different approaches to the texts and choose a diversity of African American literary texts to substantiate and illustrate their claims. Reading these articles back to back a few thematic clusters become apparent. The contributors proceed by a consistent theoretical analysis of primary texts, focusing on place, land or environment seen through the analytic categories of race, gender and class.
<5> One of the thematic clusters is the genre of the slave narrative. In her article "Border Ecology: The Slave Narrative of Henry Bibb, Nature, and the Frontier Myth" Christine Gerhardtanalyzes Henry Bibb's narrative in juxtaposition to the culturally dynamic and constitutive concept of the frontier narrative. With the frontier being regarded primarily as the interface between concepts of 'civilization' and 'wilderness,' the individuals within this contact zone had to adjust to new natural conditions and find ways of survival in nature before they, eventually, succeeded in transforming, 'cultivating' and exploiting their natural environment again. The slave narrative represents a genre that is primarily concerned with the clash between oppressive, racial exploitation and the longing for liberation that the natural environment represented to run-away slaves. By the white supremacist slaveholder society, the slaves had been identified with the 'wild' and 'beastly' images of nature. Former slaves had to overcome such a view of nature and, yet, were longing for nature due to its liberating powers:
While the slave narrative does certainly not focus on environmental issues, its perpetual restaging of the protagonist's first encounter with the wilderness, as well as the absence of economic profit as primary incentive and the insignificance of conquest outline a 'frontier mind' that perceives relationship, mutuality and interdependence as central aspects of human-nature interaction. (26)
By pointing out the ecocritical concern of slave and frontier narratives?, Gerhardt claims that the slave narrative subverts and undermines dominant white concepts of land and nature by functioning also as a beacon of emancipation and freedom. By moving through nature, the formerly enslaved become free Americans; they develop self-reliance, adjust to the environment and, finally, transform and exploit it similar to the frontiersmen. (The genre of the slave narrative is also discussed by Sylvia Mayer in her concluding article to this collection.)
<6> Although also pointing in the direction of a second thematic cluster - environmental justice - Barbara Cook joins Gerhardt in her ecocritical reading of slave narratives. In her article "Enclosed by Racist Politics: Space, Place, and Power Dynamics in the Slave Narrative of Harriet Jacobs and in Environmental Justice Activism," the point of departure for Cook's argumentation is Gaston Bachelard's notion that the individual's spaces of shelter define or strongly influence her or his perspective on the world. Cook analyzes Jacob's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Written by Herself in the light of contemporary environmental justice issues in general and the racist repercussion of toxic waste and environmental damage in the USA in particular. Cook compares the literal confinement of Jacobs in the attic of her grandmother's house and her "physical and psychic enclosure" (32) in the economic structure as well as in gender and race politics of her time to the disproportionately high toxic damage in African American communities today due to industrial and governmental decisions about toxic waste sites. Cook holds that "slave narratives can be considered an extended metaphor for environmental racism as it operates today" (33). Using Jacobs' narrative, she points out the injustice of such a situation, yet also stresses the "visible and invisible control and power dynamics" (38) that can spring form these spaces. Whereas the environmental concern in the slave narrative is left pending, Cook clearly locates the ecocritical position taken by activists' groups in their political engagement and the cultural interpretation of that situation: "Racial environmental inequities rise out of the western cultural principle of mastery over nature [...] in which racial stereotypes and biases are rooted" (41).
<7> In "Changing Landscapes: Mapping Breast Cancer as an Environmental Justice Issue in Audre Lorde's The Cancer Journals," Tina Richardsonshows how Lorde's essay collection questions and disputes the dominant narratives of breast cancer by making them an object of feminist critique as much as of environmental justice. Environmental justice is defined by Richardson as an "overlapping of racial and economic issues alongside institutionally sanctioned environmental policies and practices. As a movement, environmental justice represents the convergence of social justice with environmental concerns. It draws a connection between the health of human individuals and communities and the health of the physical environments they inhabit" (130). This take is reflected in a number of essays in this collection, as they challenge the dominant view on contamination and health, exemplified and furthered by popular films such as Erin Brockovich. In the popular perception, the communities most at risk are not defined by economic class and not so much race. By linking cancer to environmental devastation, this article establishes a parallel to Barbara Cooks essay. Next to race, which comprises the binding link among all the contributions, Richardson's analysis of Audre Lorde's essays centers around the question how gender must be considered as a "signifier of risk" (133) as well. Richardson points at the textual and political ways by which "Lorde illustrates how capitalist practices, government agendas, and masculinist privilege converge upon women's bodies with devastating consequences" (129). Richardson deduces:
In The Cancer Journals Lorde portrays the body as both biological object and cultural representation, a portrayal that illustrates how material characteristics of bodies are abstracted to function as signifiers of power, or its absence. In the abstraction of embodied characteristics color becomes race, sex becomes gender, and so on: the movement between this material body and the signifier intended to represent the material body creates a kind of linguistic slippage. In the space that slippage creates, ideological meaning takes root and flourishes becoming the central definition attributed to the material characteristic. In this way the biological object becomes the prompt for political interpellation. (134)
<8> Another article, Charlotte Zoë Walker's "'Wounded Green': Spirit, War, Death and Environmental Justice in Toni Cade Bambara's 'The Sea Birds are Still Alive' and 'Going Critical'" is also concerned with the interface of race and gender. In the light of the two discussed stories, Walker maintains that Bambara intricately relates environmental destruction to "patriarchal militarism and governmental cruelty" (126). Yet, she also points out courage, hope and progress in the actions of her characters. This knowledge may not be in the focus of Bambara's narratives, yet Walker demonstrates in two sample texts how the writer weaves "a woman of color's perspective on an ecofeminist point of view" (126) into the texture of her storytelling.
<9> Where Cook has discussed the racist injustices behind the placing of toxic industrial and waste sites, Monika Geilernanalyzes the highly engaging and so far largely neglected question of the place of literal or metaphorical parasites in an ecocritical perspective on the world. Her article "Of Parasites and Humans: Encounters with Nature in Richard Wright's Native Son and Charles Johnson's Dreamer" demonstrates how parasites do not lend themselves quite as easily to ecocritical analysis, or actually disturb some of the ecocritical theorizing going on. By discussing two fictional texts, Richard Wright's Native Son and Charles Johnson's Dreamer, Geilern reads "urban setting as urban environment" and shows the intricate interrelatedness of environmental problems in densely-populated cities like Chicago with racism and poverty. In her discussion, parasites, here exemplified by a rat and cockroaches, are considered so disturbing and repulsive because they establish "a constant, although unwanted reminder that the boundaries between bodies, individuals, and species are illusive and artificial" (101). In doing so, the consideration of parasites thwarts an easy application of moral and ethical environmental justice issues to non-human species, as they cause torment to humans and threaten not only health and hygiene, yet also community and solidarity. Triggering a loss of control, making the protagonists vulnerable and aggressive, those parasites exemplify how environmental questions in urban settings are in fact tied to social and racial injustice. Although parasites signify a part of nature that causes humans distress and suffering rather than pastoral replenishment, it is racism that "deprived [African-Americans] of the most basic requirements of decent human housing" (106) and, therefore, causes their constant encounter with parasites. And yet, through the intrusion of the parasite in the depicted urban setting, nature becomes an agent in the fictional tableau discusses by Geilern and forces humans to accept themselves as part of this nature.
<10> In her article "Harlem and Primitivism: A Green Reading of Claude McKay's Celebration of Ethnicity in an Urban Context", Ann-Cathrin Nabholzcontrasts the European-American desire to find personal freedom in a natural setting outside urban spaces with the African-American development of a "distinctive urban consciousness" (73). Nabholz takes a close look at two characters in Claude McKay's fiction to approach the notion of the pastoral with an ecocritical eye. She points out how the pastoral vision is quite problematic for African-American writers. The trauma of enslavement goes counter an idealization of rural imagery, so that the pastoral ideal has nothing to offer for African-American urban characters. Nabholz argues for this interpretation by discussing McKays characterization in the light of primitivism and the Cartesian body-soul split: "From an ecocritical perspective however, it may be argued that by separating the body from the soul, humans have severed their own ties with nature, thereby instigating their own self-estrangement" (81). By overcoming the separation of body and mind, the 'decolonization' of the body as much as of nature, race or gender helps the protagonists to reclaim their "bodily existence in and as part of nature" (83). With this, so Nabholz' argument, McKay succeeds in advancing an ethnic identity based on physical experience of the environment, human or nun-human, rather than a dualistic pastoral idealization, which would only further the Cartesian body-soul alienation. Nabholz shows how McKay's narrative techniques succeed in promoting the experience of the city via the various senses and strengthen an "active engagement with an urban atmosphere" (85).
<11> Christa Grewe-Volpp, in "Octavia Butler and the Nature/Culture Divide: An Ecofeminist Approach to the Xenogenesis-Trilogy", analyzes the science fiction novels of Octavia Butler, which reinvent radically alternative worlds and with this suggest answers or even solutions to contemporary discourses on race and gender or even social problems in general. Butler uses the creation of her post-apocalyptic world and dystopian visions to focus on patterns of domination and their structure, particularly racism, sexism and the exploitation and destruction of natural environments. Grewe-Volpp reads Butler's trilogy as a "thought experiment" in which she tries out and reflects on different concepts of being: the "faulty humans" and the "gentle, but despotic aliens" (166). Both species seem to lead development to a dead end: "The idea of permanent originality, desired by human beings, signifies stasis and belies historical and evolutionary development. The Oankali ontology on the other hand, based on constant change, implies predictability and monotony" (167). By fictionally creating an utterly new species that is more than a combination of humans and aliens, Grewe-Volpp claims that Butler attempts at transforming the African American trauma of enslavement into the beginning of a more hopeful, transmuted future.
<12> In her concluding essay,Sylvia Mayeralso analyzes a text by Octavia Butler. In "Genre and Environmentalism: Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, Speculative Fiction, and the African American Slave Narrative" Mayer uses Butler's speculative fiction, as she prefers to call it, for a comparison of slave narrative with this modern vision of a - once more dystopian - world. While Grewe-Volpp points out that Butler's trilogy critiques the state of purity and develops alternative, symbiotic and interconnected visions, Mayer emphasizes that Parable of the Sower depicts the importance of change as the ultima ratio by showing the main protagonist in the process of developing a system of belief that focuses on environmental and social justice as much as it comprises many of the ecocritical tenets and ideals. The intertextual references to the genre of the slave narrative, which Mayer focuses on in her argumentation, helps to emphasize "the crucial importance of both basic literacy, the ability to read and to write, and environmental literacy, the knowledge about biological and ecological phenomena, for human survival" (192). A predominantly negative image of science and technology, on the other hand, points to a critique of the belief that for all environmental problems, mankind will eventually find a technological solution. In-between these two aspects lies the potential for cultural work that has to be done to secure environmental and social justice.
<13> Mayer's final comment on Butler also refers to a notion that seems to bespeak all argumentations within this collection of essays. The individual texts and their concern with racism, social injustice and environmental problems "leave[...] no doubt that transformation toward an environmentally sustainable civilization must be based on the transformation of still dominant social power dynamics and their conceptual sources of legitimization" (194). Mayer's edited collection indeed offers intriguing insights into the African-American literary environmental imagination as well as a multitude of strategies to interconnect this literature with contemporary ecological and social challenges. The articles leave the readers with thought-provoking and, yet, joyful anticipation of further research and inquiry in an increasingly multicultural, or better yet maybe, intercultural, field of ecocriticism. Particularly interesting is the fact that most of the discussed primary texts do not necessarily show explicit ecological concerns. Yet, the contributors succeed in showing how these texts are nonetheless highly relevant and ecologically significant for current social, cultural and environmental discourses, and how these hitherto unattended perspectives have implications for the field of ecocriticism in particular as much as for the understanding and texture of American literatures in general.
References
Glotfelty, Cheryll. "Introduction: Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis." The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, eds. Cheryll Glotfelty, Harold Fromm. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996. xv-xxxvii.
Dr. des. Uwe Küchler
Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Germany
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