African American intellectual thought has long provided a
touchstone for national politics and civil rights, but, as Kimberly
Smith reveals, it also has much to say about our relationship to
nature. In this first single-authored book to link African American
and environmental studies, Smith uncovers a rich tradition
stretching from the abolition movement through the Harlem
Renaissance, demonstrating that black Americans have been far from
indifferent to environmental concerns.
Beginning with environmental critiques of slave agriculture in
the early nineteenth century and evolving through critical
engagements with scientific racism, artistic primitivism,
pragmatism, and twentieth-century urban reform, Smith highlights
the continuity of twentieth-century black politics with earlier
efforts by slaves and freedmen to possess the land. She examines
the works of such canonical figures as Frederick Douglass, Booker
T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Alain Locke, all of whom wrote
forcefully about how slavery and racial oppression affected black
Americans' relationship to the environment.
Smith's analysis focuses on the importance of freedom in humans'
relationship with nature. According to black theorists, the denial
of freedom can distort one's relationship to the natural world,
impairing stewardship and alienating one from the land. Her
pathbreaking study offers the first linkage of the early
conservation movement to black history, the first detailed
description of black agrarianism, and the first analysis of
scientific racism as an environmental theory. It also offers a new
way to conceptualize black politics by bringing into view its
environmental dimension, as well as a normative environmental
theory grounded in pragmatism and aimed at identifying the social
conditions for environmental virtue.
Smith's work offers a new approach to established writers and
thinkers and shows that they justly deserve a place in the canon of
American environmental thought. African American Environmental
Thought enriches our understanding of black politics and
environmental history, and of environmental theory in general.
Because slavery and racism have shaped the meaning of the American
landscape, this body of thought offers us fresh conceptual
resources by which we can make better sense of our world.
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