Forum on Literatures of the Environment

 
Elizabeth Dodd, "Letter," PMLA 114.5 (Oct. 1999): 1094-1095.

I APPLAUD Martha Banta's decision to devote this Forum to ecocriticism, a genre of literary studies that has energized significant numbers of scholars throughout the past decade, and I welcome the opportunity to suggest new directions for scholarship to explore. For ecocriticism, despite its growing popularity, is "a predominately white movement" as Cheryll Glotfelty, a past president of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, has noted (Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, eds., The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology xxv). By far the majority of the presenters at the first two conferences of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (in 1995 and 1997) were white; a look at the index of The Ecocriticism Reader reveals that most of the authors treated by the volume's critics are also Anglo-American. Native American literature, both contemporary and traditional, does receive enthusiastic attention, but African Americans seem largely absent from this burgeoning literary, cultural, and critical movement.

One reason for this absence is that ecocritics have dedicated much of their attention to nature writing--primarily creative nonfiction in the autobiographical naturalist tradition. This genre has not attracted many black writers, who likely find that what Robinson Jeffers called inhumanism--the literary attempt to deflect aesthetic and thematic attention away from human beings or to weaken what Glen Love calls "ego-consciousness" (Glotfelty and Fromm 230)--holds little appeal for writers who already feel themselves politically, economically, and socially marginalized. And while writers such as Toni Morrison and Michael S. Harper consider questions of place--geographic locale and nonhuman nature--their work (say, Beloved or Images of Kin, respectively) treats far more visibly questions of social place, as constructed through race.

Ecocriticism, as many of its practitioners point out, seeks to complement the already well-represented critical inquiries into literature's negotiation of race, class, and gender, and I do not intend simply to wheelbarrow familiar theses into my discussion here. I certainly do not wish to suggest, as I once heard a conference panelist declare, that all injustices are so firmly linked that if we work to promote social justice we will, without even trying, "protect the environment." Ecocriticism, as William Rueckert envisioned it twenty years ago, attempts "to see literature inside the context of an ecological vision in ways which restrict neither" (Glotfelty and Fromm 105; emphasis mine). While ecocriticism underscores the ecological tenet that "everything is connected to everything else" (Rueckert [Glotfelty and Fromm 108]), as a mode of critical inquiry it necessitates attention and discussion; neither inclusions nor exclusions should be automatic and unexamined. In fact, for the field to mature, ecocriticism needs critiques of its shortcomings.

Therefore we must consider further the absence of black writers from existing ecocritical discussion. A major reason for this absence, I suspect, may be that academic inquiry--including the work of ecocritics--already expects black literature to focus almost exclusively on the social realm; as categorized by literary studies, its interest in environment is similar to the interest in socioeconomic environment that characterized naturalist novels at the close of the nineteenth century. I believe, however, that as ecocritics work to articulate the complex and often conflicted attitudes toward the North American continent that contribute to what we frequently call sense of place, we should not overlook black writing whose obvious focus is sociopolitical.

An examination of the underlying (and often nuanced) attitudes toward nonhuman nature that are encoded in literary works can contribute to what Neil Evernden calls "what it feels like to have a territory" (Glotfelty and Fromm 97)--or what it feels like not to. As Leonard Lutwack notes, human "use of the earth's resources, [our] alteration of places in every corner of the globe, must proceed now with a view not only to present profit and pleasure but to the survival of the very next generation" (The Role of Place in Literature 2). African American writers who focus on the Anglo-European long relation with slavery have a unique perspective on both profit and pleasure, and an ecocritical examination of their work can illuminate unrecognized aspects of it, as well as discovering its insights into how sense of place and ethical awareness intersect. Ecocritics would do well to consider the implications suggested by this convergence of ethics.

First, we are reminded that issues of race in ecological theory or politics extend well beyond where landfills or toxic industries are located, though these are certainly important matters. Second, and more crucial for literary studies, we must continue to develop the examinations of both genre and aesthetics for what Lawrence Buell has defined as an "ecological text" in his important book The Environmental Imagination. Even as Michael Branch, Joni Adamson, Terrell Dixon, and other scholars have begun to call for recognition that inner city and urban residents (regardless of race) may not feel the appeal of wilderness literature, we should not inadvertantly ghettoize black literature, as if it had nothing to contribute to our understanding of the vexed human relation to the nonhuman world. In fact, this work has much to tell us, if we pay close enough ecocritical attention.

ELIZABETH DODD
Kansas State University