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Green is the New Black: Reading the Black Experience Ecocritically The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Prince, Shannon Joyce. 2018. Green is the New Black: Reading the Black Experience Ecocritically. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:41121233 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Green is the New Black: Reading the Black Experience Ecocritically A dissertation presented by Shannon Joyce Prince to The Department of African and African American Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of African and African American Studies Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts May 2018 © 2018 Shannon Joyce Prince All rights reserved. Dissertation Advisor: Professor Doris Sommer Shannon Joyce Prince Green is the New Black: Reading the Black Experience Ecocritically Abstract Green is the New Black argues that African American literature, as a genre, should not be understood simply as literary works written by blacks of the United States but as a collection of artistic products aggregated by the shared characteristics of their content – in substantial part, culturally distinct ways of relating to the environment. This dissertation contends that African American engagement with green is shaped both by blacks’ experience of being rendered inhuman socially and legally as well as by the race’s retention of the figure of Ananse – a spider-man from West African orature – and of the techniques of Anansesεm. It also proffers a body of black-green tropes that have been revised across African American literature from the nineteenth century through the present day. Green is the New Black engages in ecocentric analysis of both canonical and obscure black writing. I read Frederick Douglass’ My Bondage and My Freedom as a work that employs Anansesεm techniques to humanize blacks and animalize slaveholders. Next, I use Charles Chesnutt’s “The Goophered Grapevine” to reveal the depth of the disastrous consequences of the Flint water crisis, treating both African American literature and life ecocritically. The following chapter challenges Chesnutt’s assertation that he drew on childhood memories of black folklore unconsciously and insignificantly when crafting his work. I argue instead that attention to the natural elements in Chesnutt’s Conjure Woman stories and his novel The iii Colonel’s Dream reveal deliberate, intricate revisions of the tar baby Anansesεm that, when exegeted, unveil hidden layers of meaning. Next, I examine the many ways Toni Morrison makes use of nature in Tar Baby. She employs environment, flora, and fauna to engage with issues of race and property, to revise black-green tropes, and to create an ecocentric African diaspora retelling of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid.” In a second chapter on Morrison’s work, I explain how her novel Home suggests that black social death is followed by a sort of green afterlife in which dehumanized African Americans are forced to exist as animals or plants. Green is the New Black concludes with a close reading of a lesser known work, C. S. Giscombe’s book of poetry Giscome Road which is set in nineteenth century Canada. In this final chapter, I examine Giscombe’s vision of what African American relationships with nature could look like outside of the context of racial dehumanization. iv Contents Introduction ................................................................................................................................ vi Chapter One .............................................................................................................................. 19 Chapter Two .............................................................................................................................. 88 Chapter Three ......................................................................................................................... 115 Chapter Four ........................................................................................................................... 165 Chapter Five ............................................................................................................................ 218 Chapter Six .............................................................................................................................. 266 v Acknowledgements A Yoruba proverb states, “A river that forgets its source will dry up.” I will always remember with profound gratitude the contributions of the scholars, mentors, and loved ones who aided in the realization of this dissertation. Professor Doris Sommer, you move with such grace across interdisciplinary terrain. Thank you helping me develop a syncretic sensibility. Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., you taught me to take a scalpel to language as a surgeon does a patient – to carefully, tenderly, and incisively open a text and discover what is inside. Professor Glenda Carpio, by the time you finished preparing me for the oral examination, I felt like a secular Hafiza -- I now carry the African American literary canon in my heart. Professor George Elliott Clarke, you guided me – with unbounded joie de vivre – above the 49th parallel north into the realm of African Canadian literature, giving me a new genre to cherish and explore. I am so grateful that you were the William Lyon Mackenzie King Visiting Professor in Canadian Studies at Harvard University during 2013-2014 academic year. My Yale Law School professors’ specialties helped me illumine new facets of African American literature. Professor Kysar, your kindness is a synecdoche for what makes the Yale Law community so special. Thank you for helping me develop my law and literature approach to justice. Professor John Witt, learning from you felt like time traveling – in your classroom, the law and economics of the nineteenth century become as vivid and urgent as those of our own era. Professor Owen Fiss, thank you for the honing my analytical skills – you make your students not just better future lawyers, but better thinkers. Professor Carol Rose, you elucidate the ethical imperatives that arise from recognizing the environment as not merely the site of flora and fauna but also as moral terrain. Professor Stephen Latham, you so dexterously weave together human history and the history of humanization and dehumanization, revealing how each has an impact upon the other. Professor Khiara Bridges, your visits to Yale Law render the campus incandescent with joy. You model how to approach scholarship with the deep creativity required of artistic praxis. Dean Garth McCavana, Dean Sheila Thomas, and Professor Marla Frederick, thank you so very much for your prodigious support. Dr. Benjamin Woodring, you have been an all- purpose mentor! Thank you for your unfailing generosity in advising me through law school, the bar exam, and my doctoral studies. Dr. Robin Mount and Stephanie Parsons, thank you for encouraging me to pursue my doctorate at Harvard. I so appreciate your warm welcome and gracious support. To my parents Charles and Laquetta Prince, thank you for sharing this experience with me. From perusing my analysis of “The Goophered Grapevine” as though it were a novel to discussing Frederick Douglass with me as though he were a beloved uncle, you have journeyed with me to the nineteenth century and back. To my sister Ashley Prince Murphy, when I began my doctorate, I asked you, as an alumna of Harvard College, with what professor I should be sure to work. You answered, “Professor Sommer.” Thank you for helping me start this endeavor off properly – and for being there for me until the end. To my extended family, whenever I think of you, I feel as though I am standing at the base of a redwood tree with my head cocked back in wonder as I peer up at the top -- I am utterly awed and inspired by the nurturing you provide. And to my other loved ones, thank you for being my banyan roots – the wondrous source of my sustenance. vi Dedication In loving memory of Mildred Joyce Guillory, the kind of grandmother who would have taught Rosa Parks to sit and Maya Angelou to rise vii Introduction The Law Slips being property once myself i have a feeling for it, that’s why I can talk about environment. Lucille Clifton1 I am more than a spider, much more than just a man. Ananse in The River Where Blood is Born, Sandra Jackson-Opoku2 Introduction For over 300 years American law has wondered: Are black people green? Are these humans from Africa, in fact, human after all? Or are they trees that speak? Mules that walk on two feet? Faced with the contradictory incontrovertibility of African humanity and the socio- economic imperative of black fungibility, America’s pre- and post-Revolutionary statutes have suffered from cognitive dissonance. Its jurisprudential slippages are color coded – “black” signifying undervalued race; “green,” the extension of nature. That is to say, law, both explicitly and through disparate impact, tends to achieve African Americans’ subordination, to segregate them – if not expel them – from the human family. These racial exiles are shooed across the 1 Lucille Clifton,