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Reviewed by:
  • Shades of Green: Visions of Nature in the Literature of American Slavery, 1770–1860
  • Paul Outka
Ian Frederick Finseth, Shades of Green: Visions of Nature in the Literature of American Slavery, 1770–1860 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009). Pp. xii, 348. $44.95.

For much too long, ecocriticism and the environmental movement paid little attention to race and how it might both shape natural experience and be shaped by it. Scholars in the field, almost overwhelmingly white, often assumed that nature was a racially neutral repository of value and largely ignored the homogeneity of their numbers and their scholarly interests. This situation has started to change, both with greater diversity in the practitioners of ecocriticism and in a number of recent works in the field—including Jeffrey Myers's groundbreaking 2005 study, Converging Stories: Race, Ecology, and Environmental Justice in American Literature, Kimberly K. Smith's 2007 work, African American Environmental Thought: Foundations, and my own 2008 Race and Nature from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance—that seek to analyze how profoundly imbricated racial and natural experience have been throughout history. Ian Finseth's Shades of Green adds to this rapidly growing body of scholarship and should prove an invaluable resource, particularly for those interested in the early American and antebellum periods.

Shades of Green takes up the fraught interrelationships among slavery, abolition, racial science, and representations of nature. In a wide-ranging discussion, Finseth considers how revolutionary-era writers engaged natural history and Romantic aesthetics and made these new intellectual currents serve the antislavery cause, how racial "science" influenced antebellum abolitionism, and how African Americans were portayed in pastoral and landscape writing and painting. Inter-leaved within this broader intellectual and cultural history, Finseth offers extended readings of a range of important writers, including (among others) J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Olaudah Equiano, David Walker, Martin Delany, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Frederick Douglass. The discussion of theodicy and nature interwoven throughout the book is particularly insightful. Finseth's acute analysis of the fraught relationship between the belief in nature as a divine creation and the "natural" origin of racial difference in early abolitionist debates not only is immensely worthwhile on its own terms, but in turn sets up an often brilliant examination of the tense relationship between early evolutionary theory, antiracism, and natural utopianism in Emerson's antislavery writings. While I do have two reservations about the book, overall this is clearly an important, useful, and badly needed contribution to a highly complex topic that offers a wealth of valuable scholarship for any reader interested in this set of issues or this period.

On to the two reservations. The wide scope of Finseth's discussion is ably supported by an impressive depth of scholarship; on both the primary and secondary levels, he knows in great detail what he is talking about. This virtue, however, at least occasionally threatens to submerge the larger argument in a welter of those details, as he turns toward contextualization and description when more argument and analysis might be welcome. When he claims in the introduction, for example, that "invocations of nature in the cultural fight over the meanings of race entailed a remarkable diversity of representational strategies, responded continuously to shifting cultural circumstances, and drew their power from deeper levels of human thought and feeling" (6) or, in a later discussion of painting, when he states that [End Page 146] "racial landscapes stage complex phenomenological dramas of human experience in the natural world" that "crucially, ha[ve] the potential either to disrupt or to reinforce dominant patterns of cultural power, or more commonly, to work ambiguously within and against those patterns" (209), I found myself unsurprisingly in agreement but wanting a more definitive statement of his own position rather than the range of examples that are proffered.

Second—and more substantively—Finseth's discussion of race and nature sometimes seems to assume that a racialized nature is one that represents black people or other people of color; the connections between the construction of whiteness as an unmarked normative subject position and the assertion of nature as an unmarked normative experience are not his focus. While, as...

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