ABSTRACT
This chapter employs an environmental justice framework to consider the ways in which Black urbanites in the US have been systematically excluded from green spaces, and it tackles the stereotype that urban Black neighborhoods are devoid of plant life. The chapter analyzes Naima Green’s photographic series Jewels from the Hinterland (2013–), which features prominent Black artists, activists, and professionals in city gardens, arguing that Green subverts White narratives of urban decay and environmental disinterest within Black communities through her quiet, everyday portraits. The chapter then examines Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s choreopoem red, black, & GREEN: a blues (2011), which formulates ecological practices that celebrate Black life and improvise with limited land. Taken together, Green’s and Joseph’s works play with misrepresentations of Black relationships to nonhuman nature and celebrate Black urbanites’ experiences of plants.
