W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, and Richard Wright: Toward an Ecocriticism of Color

Scholars working in the field of ecocriticism in American literary studies have come to see that their most important task in the coming years is to take up and engage the cultural productions of peoples of color, especially African Americans. Such a transformation entails exploring and theorizing not just African American fictional and nonfictional narratives, but also African American critical and theoretical works that undergird and explicate other forms of cultural production. Currently, the forebearers of ecocriticism—"the study of literature as if the environment mattered" (Mazel 1)—seem to be an unassailable who's who of American nature writing: Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, John Muir, and Rachel Carson. To this pantheon I here would like to add a couple unlikely characters—W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. For as Kathleen Wallace and Karla Armbruster rightly point out, it now behooves literary critics to "question . . . why so few African American voices are recognized as part of nature writing and ecocriticism" (2). To ignore African American voices is to risk the field's ultimate demise, as Paul Tidwell argues:

In short, ecocriticism was founded on a too limited canon of writings based on too narrow a definition of nature writing . . . Ecocritics who continue to resist or reject African American concepts as foreign to their concerns risk a hardening of their developing discourse into a reactionary and racist defense of an essentialized idea of nature.

("The Blackness of the Whale")

Not only must ecocritics reread the fiction of African Americans ecocritically; they must also reread African American critics and thinkers ecocritically, so that all might begin to reformulate the questions and revise the assumptions that undergird the field. Any ecocritical methodology of African American literature must necessarily entail an ecocritical analysis of foundational African American critics and thinkers—not just, and not merely, white American ones. To do so offers the potential to reread literature as if the environment mattered differently.

To recuperate or claim Du Bois and Washington as environmentally conscious thinkers symbolizes an important step in beginning that transformation. Regardless of what one thinks of Washington or Du Bois, it is undeniable that these two men, in myriad ways, have framed America's twentieth-century discourse of race relations. Consequently, an ecocritical analysis of Washington's Up From Slavery (1901) and Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk (1903) offers a means of deepening critical understanding of their relationship to environmental awareness, in that such consciousness participates in ecocritically reimagining subsequent African American texts. As a "case study" for such a reimagining, I turn to the prominent fiction and nonfiction of novelist, essayist, and memoirist Richard Wright. This essay begins to reconstruct a genealogy of African American ecocriticism, putting Du Bois, Washington, and Wright into creative tension in order to begin to sketch a portrait of an early twentieth-century ecocriticism of color. In so doing, it asks critics to be conscious of various environments (urban, rural, and suburban, and the miscegenation and marginalization therein) as well as be attuned to the political ramifications of social justice, justice not just for the clichéd redwoods and spotted owls, but for communities and cultures as well.

The problem for ecocriticism, say some of its leading practitioners, is its fealty to what today are restrictive definitions and premises, particularly in regard to concerns of race and ethnicity—though its attention to environmental concerns in the late 1970s and early 1980s sounded a much-needed alarm about the health of the planet. As scholars such as Robert D. Bullard and Carolyn Merchant have shown since, though, environmental crises reflect, and cohere along, racial and gender lines, thus demonstrating the importance of "intersectional" ways of thinking "green"—with race and racism a critical axis. Such an attention to race demands a reconfigured consciousness of both the cultural and the political expressions of environmentalism—and such a reconfiguration requires ecocriticism's practitioners to rethink their conceptualizations of environmentalism. Said John Elder at the 1995 conference of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, "Just as...