Race and Nature from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance

Description

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. 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