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Race, Retreat, and Refuge: Black Voices, American Nature Writing, and Ecocritical Exile Bryon Patrick Williams

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Race, Retreat, and Refuge: Black Voices, American Nature Writing, and Ecocritical Exile Bryon Patrick Williams Duquesne University Duquesne Scholarship Collection Electronic Theses and Dissertations Spring 1-1-2017 Race, Retreat, and Refuge: Black Voices, American Nature Writing, and Ecocritical Exile Bryon Patrick Williams Follow this and additional works at: https://dsc.duq.edu/etd Recommended Citation Williams, B. P. (2017). Race, Retreat, and Refuge: Black Voices, American Nature Writing, and Ecocritical Exile (Doctoral dissertation, Duquesne University). Retrieved from https://dsc.duq.edu/etd/155 This One-year Embargo is brought to you for free and open access by Duquesne Scholarship Collection. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Duquesne Scholarship Collection. For more information, please contact [email protected]. RACE, RETREAT, AND REFUGE: BLACK VOICES, AMERICAN NATURE WRITING, AND ECOCRITICAL EXILE A Dissertation Submitted to the McAnulty College of Liberal Arts Duquesne University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy By Bryon P. Williams May 2017 Copyright by Bryon P. Williams 2017 RACE, RETREAT, AND REFUGE: BLACK VOICES, AMERICAN NATURE WRITING, AND ECOCRITICAL EXILE By Bryon P. Williams Approved April 11, 2017 ___________________________________ ___________________________________ Thomas P. Kinnahan, Ph.D. Faith Barrett, Ph.D. Associate Professor of English Associate Professor of English (Committee Chair) (Committee Member) ___________________________________ Kathy L. Glass, Ph.D. Associate Professor of English (Committee Member) ___________________________________ ___________________________________ James Swindal, Ph.D. Greg Barnhisel, Ph.D. Dean, McAnulty College of Liberal Arts Chair, English Department Professor of Philosophy Professor of English iii ABSTRACT RACE, RETREAT, AND REFUGE: BLACK VOICES, AMERICAN NATURE WRITING, AND ECOCRITICAL EXILE By Bryon P. Williams May 2017 Dissertation supervised by Professor Thomas P. Kinnahan While existing scholarship has begun to recognize the extensive environmental experience of African Americans during the nineteenth century, black-authored environmental writing from the era is conspicuously scant in studies and anthologies into the present, even in volumes devoted to ecocritically-inflected texts by authors of color. My dissertation argues that contemporary, racially-aligned divides and gaps in environmental discourse have roots in the 1840s and 50s, when the nature writing genre coalesced into its most enduring form in the works of Henry David Thoreau, literary artist turned cultural icon. This key era—during which black Americans were frequently subject to systematic deprivation of literacy, liberty, and agency—is also the period when the American nature writing genre emerged as a definitive fusion of environmental encounter and writing. I contend that there do exist published works from the mid-nineteenth century that include numerous first-person accounts of black eco-actors in iv intensive relationship with the natural environment, but that these narratives have been rendered invisible as nature writing (and even black writing) because although the experiences were lived and spoken by black environmental actors, they were written down by a white amanuensis. I read Thoreau’s nature writing against a little-studied volume called The Refugee, a contemporaneous collection of first-person narratives by black refugees who fled the United States to settle in the wilderness of Ontario, their accounts recorded by abolitionist Benjamin Drew. Thoreau’s work establishes a tradition of “retreat” values such as voluntary solitude, individualism, separatism, and universality. Retreat values come to have a hegemonic influence on subsequent environmental discourse. The narratives from Thoreau’s black counterparts, however, express a set of “refuge” values that emphasize community, connection, practical experience, and the recognition of inequalities and contingencies. Narratives of refuge work as corrective acts of resistance against the assumptions of easy universality in the white-authored nature retreat. In establishing and fleshing out the dialectical categories of retreat and refuge, this dissertation brings to light black-authored environmental narratives that serve to unsettle, invigorate, and reconstitute the nature writing genre. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract iv Introduction viii Chapter 1 Black Invisibility in Environmental Discourse: Roots and Legacies 1 Chapter 2 Nature Writing and the Apotheosis of the Retreat Author-Hero 32 Chapter 3 Countering the Pastoral Retreat: Recovery, Re-creation, Recognition, and Refuge 80 Chapter 4 Heaven is Under Our Feet: The Granular Work of Black Nature Writing 144 Works Cited 178 vi Introduction I shall focus on the history of the “green Thoreau,” on Thoreau’s posthumous transformation into an environmental saint, as a barometer of the pulsations, limitations, and promise of green thinking in America—Lawrence Buell Most nature writing is barricaded with omissions to make it just another gated community—Rebecca Solnit American nature writing is, to paraphrase Alfred North Whitehead’s famous quip on Plato, often treated as a series of footnotes to Thoreau. And the channels cut by environmental texts of the mid-nineteenth century direct cultural currents far beyond the domains of purely literary influence. In Dramas of Solitude: Narratives of Retreat in American Nature Writing, Randall Roorda proclaims Thoreau the “progenitor of the narrative of retreat” (27), a branch of nature writing in which the lines between literary action and literal action are intentionally transcended. With Thoreau as model and inspiration, subsequent generations of emulators have embarked on variations of what Lawrence Buell calls “the Thoreauvian pilgrimage” (Environmental Imagination 311), from visits to Walden Pond in tribute to an environmental saint, to individual homesteading projects (with corresponding written accounts) based on Thoreauvian principles of solitude, withdrawal, and self-sufficiency. The questions of whether, how, and to what extent readers are intended to treat Thoreau as a model and to imitate his experience stretch from the earliest reviews of 1854’s Walden into critical debates of the present. In a December 1854 review, Lydia Maria Child delves into extended and detailed distinctions between the “mere superficial imitator” of Thoreau and those who “follow Mr. Thoreau’s footsteps by being more obedient to their loftiest instincts” (389). Among the most imitated of Thoreau’s acts is the retreat to nature, a move that continues to wield influence on mainstream vii environmental thought, and a legacy evident not only in the culture at large but in ongoing academic debates. In Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (2008), Ursula K. Heise proposes loosening place-based retreat’s tenacious hold on environmental thinking, calling it a “visionary dead end if it is understood as a founding ideological principle or a principal didactic means of guiding individuals and communities back to nature” (21) and arguing that it may be a hindrance to the more planetary eco- cosmopolitanism that she sees as necessary. She challenges the assumption of mainstream ecocriticism that “genuine ethical commitments can only grow out of the lived immediacies of the local” (42) and argues that the individual retreats in the Thoreauvian lineage may be “valuable thought experiments” but are useless or even harmful when held up as “principal models” or as “paradigms” (48). One key flaw in intense localism Heise names explicitly: individual retreat projects exemplify the “social and financial privilege” of groups that “typically have access to the financial means, education, occupational flexibility, and time to carry out such endeavors” (48). In response to the problematic limitations of “reterritorialization” (“the environmentalist call for a reconnection with the local”), Heise calls for “deterritorialization”: “the challenge for environmentalist thinking…is to shift the core of its cultural imagination from a sense of place to a less territorial and more systemic sense of planet” (55-56). Heise identifies multivalent privileges (of class, gender, and race) endemic to place-based retreat and proposes that place simply shouldn’t matter so much, arguing that going planetary in our thinking is the key to transcending the provincial limits of the local. But other veins of writers critical of mainstream environmentalism argue not that place shouldn’t matter but that the wrong kinds of places (and inhabitants of those places, human and non-human) have figured too viii exclusively in the American cultural imagination. In recent decades witnessing the (sometimes accordant, sometimes discordant) ascendancies of environmentalism, ecocriticism, and the environmental justice movement, critics have described again and again the persistent invisibility of African Americans in mainstream environmental discourse. James Cone asserts that it “is a well-founded belief in the African American community” that “[w]hite people care more about the endangered whale and the spotted owl than they do about the survival of young blacks in our nation’s cities” (138). For Theodore Walker, “[t]oo often what passes for a wider concern inclusive of the environment is in fact a white racially gerrymandered concern which reaches out to include plants and animals while continuing to exclude black and colored peoples” (279). Willis Jenkins cites
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