Black Ecologies of Dissent

Session Submission Type: Paper Session: Traditional Format

Abstract

Questions of sustainability, ecology, and environmental justice have begun to garner much attention within the fields of black studies, critical ethnic studies, and American studies within the contemporary moment. This panel asks what possibilities emerge when we center “black ecologies” in our scholarly inquiries. We designate "Black Ecologies" as alternative spaces and theoretical frameworks that center black (femme/female) vitality, black (female/femme) relationships with the environment—including human and non-human life, and understandings of black (female/femme) ecological relationality that exceed largely white/eurocentric frameworks that abound in environmental literature and philosophy, nature writing, and ecocriticism. Guiding questions include: How do normative responses to environmental injustice unshackle or delimit our scholarship? How do state logics condition our engagement with blackness, gender, and ecology? And how can discourses of humanism reflect black ecofeminist concerns in the present moment and beyond it?

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• Sandy Alexandre, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Individual Presentations

• Reframing Promise and Failure in the Modern Era of Environmental ‘Justice’ - Chelsea Frazier, Northwestern University

• Unmanifesting ‘Destiny’: Black Female Corporeality as Sites of Ecological Dissent - Esme G Murdock, Morehouse College

• Octavia Butler, Black Quantum Futurism, and the Black Eco-Poetics of Disaster and Resistance - Kim D. Hester Williams, Sonoma State University

• Jewels from the Hinterland: A Study in Arts-based Storytelling - Naima Green, International Center for Photography