Black to Nature: Pastoral Return and African American Culture by Stefanie K. Dunning

Abstract

Reviewed by: Black to Nature: Pastoral Return and African American Culture by Stefanie K. Dunning Claudia J. Ford Black to Nature: Pastoral Return and African American Culture. By Stefanie K. Dunning. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2021. xv + 193 pp. $99.00 hardcover/$25.00 paper/$18.99 e-book. In Black to Nature: Pastoral Return and African American Culture, Stefanie K. Dunning weaves together key concepts that frame the relationship between Black people and the environment, namely, ideas about pastoral return, wilderness, the natural world, land, and property. Focusing on contemporary culture, Dunning offers ecocritical readings of Beyoncé's Lemonade (2016); Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust (1991); Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones (2011); Benh Zeitlin's Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012); Queen Sugar (2016), produced by Ava DuVernay; Kaitlyn Greenidge's We Love You, Charlie Freeman (2014); Colm McCarthy's The Girl with All the Gifts (2016); and Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower (1993). Her book provides thought-provoking insights on Black freedom and its relationship to environmental consciousness. Black feminist scholars will find much to value in Dunning's descriptions of the relationships among Black life, Black women, and the environment. She analyzes the mechanisms through which anti-Blackness is visited upon the bodies and lives of Black women. However, she makes explicit that the theoretical frame of her book is Afropessimism and critical race theory, not ecofeminism. Rather, she reminds us that all of the examined texts "feature [End Page 127] Black women and/or girls as their protagonists or are authored by Black women" (24), which for Dunning is significant because "the liberation of the Black woman is the liberation of the world" (25). Dunning assesses how natural spaces have been constructed and represented for Black people, going far beyond the truism that the Black experience of the natural world is shaped by racism. She identifies three critical ruptures between Black people and the environment imposed by white supremacy: the interpretive frame of primitivism, the violent regimes of chattel slavery, and lynching. In her close readings, Dunning discusses depictions of Black life—and social death—and the ways Black people attempt to resist these white-supremacist violences committed against Black bodies and spaces. In fact, she argues, "A stunning parallelism characterizes the treatment of both the natural world and Black people" (10). Black to Nature closely examines these associations among the abuse of nature, the oppression of Black people, and the exploitation that structures Black life. It is not necessary to have read the novels or seen the films to grasp the points Dunning makes. Her purpose is to probe the correctives to anti-Blackness, the possibilities explored in literature and life for Black liberation from oppression along with Black investment in nature. Her thesis is that "natural spaces in Black texts are adjacent to this notion of abolition, that they signal the end of civil society—which would be the end of anti-Blackness—as we know it" (21). Dunning's work is profoundly scholarly; at times the language is dense, as when she explains Afropessimism, Black social death, Black liberation, and other theoretical concepts covered in the book. Still, this is a readable text, and Dunning deftly brings the reader along in her readings of popular culture that represent Black aspirations for freedom through relationships to the natural world. Dunning's readings engage pressing contemporary subjects including misogynoir, Black Lives Matter, Blackhood, water as a Black metaphorical trope, animal rights, the child welfare system, Indigenous ecological knowledge, land rematriation and property rights, Indigenous and African American relationships, homelessness, placelessness, and the imaginations and communications of the plant world. Dunning interweaves these fascinating topics skillfully and succinctly, always supporting her central points about the potential for the natural world to mediate Black aspirations—indeed, human aspirations—for abolition and freedom. Introspection emerges as both strategy and subtext of Dunning's book. Even as she diagnoses the ruptures between Black life and nature initiated by white [End Page 128] Enlightenment thinking and elucidates the entrenched anti-Blackness of civil society, she inserts snippets of her own contemplative practices as examples of Black thriving and environmental connection. While exploring Black...