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Not offered during 2022-23 academic year.

Questions of sustainability, ecology, and environmental justice have begun to garner much attention within the field of contemporary Black literary studies. This course investigates the various ways that notions of blackness and ecology converge. Throughout the semester we will become familiar with various textual representations of ecology and Blackness from across the African diaspora. We will explore the ways in which categories such as race, gender, nature, place, and technology cohere and become complicated within a contemporary catalog of texts that we might call Black ecoliterature. Central questions guiding the course include "How do our notions of blackness and gender inform our ideas of ecology?" and "In what ways does centering blackness and/or black subjects shift our extant understandings of environmentalism writ large?" Guiding authors will include Octavia Butler, Wangari Maathai, Nnedi Okorafor, Julie Dash, Wangari Maathai, Zora Neale Hurston, and Alice Walker among others.