ABSTRACT
Black women’s writing remains an overlooked site of inquiry for literary ecocriticism, and Black women’s attention to the natural world reveals the important and uninvestigated connections between ecocriticism and Black feminist knowledge production. Similarly, the term “ecopoetics” is not new to the field of literary criticism; however, its relevance and application to Black women’s writing have been largely uninterrogated. This chapter brings together ecopoetics and Black women’s writing to analyze how Black women use natural world imagery. Focusing on key scenes from Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun and Toni Morrison’s novel Home, this chapter examines how Black women writers (re)imagine the natural world as generative, liberatory, and outside of narratives of trauma, terror, and dominion. Hansberry and Morrison are part of a rich legacy of Black women writers who deploy natural world idioms in radical, innovative ways that enable them to simultaneously articulate and critique the nuances of their oppression. The natural world is a fitting symbol for Black women because, like the land, their bodies have been deemed “unconsentable terrain” throughout history. This essay draws upon Katherine McKittrick’s framework of analyzing Black women’s cartographies and Delores Williams’ study of the colonial link between Black women’s bodies and nature. In doing so, it reveals the centrality of the natural world and ecological materialities in Black women’s literature and positions natural world writing as a legitimate site of Black feminist epistemology. Ultimately, this chapter seeks to answer the question, what does ecopoetics look like from Black women’s perspectives?
