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

Abstract

Stefanie K. Dunning’s Black to Nature offers a rich discussion of the ways that Black texts—both verbal and visual—engage nature. Additionally, her project enriches debates in ecocritical and environmental humanist circles that highlight (and perhaps celebrate) the ways that Black and liberatory conceptions of engagements with nature represent an inherent subversion of the ills of Western “civil” society. A central ill that Dunning aims to disrupt is the notion that nature is understood “in Western Society as a material object occupying a nonhuman elsewhere” (6). By contextualizing the racist and sexist ways that the figure of the nonhuman is produced, Dunning draws our attention to the kinds of discourses that reinforce anti-Black violence and ecological violence as interrelated phenomena. It is likely for this reason that Dunning divests from ecocriticism as a paradigmatic space to discuss nature. As she rightly notes, “eco-criticism, as it historically unfolded, did so without regard for the particular ways that nature and the environment figured in nonwhite contexts, and reproduced many of the most problematic ideas about race within the broader culture” (7). By contrast, Black to Nature focuses squarely on the ways that nature and environment figures in Black (con)texts and is guided by nature understood as a mutable signifier, mutating ever more intensely as it leaps from one part of her Black woman-authored archive and lands into another.