Troubling Ecology

Catalog description

Questions of sustainability, ecology, and environmental justice have begun to garner much attention within the field of Black literary studies. This course investigates the various ways that notions of blackness, indigeneity, gender formation, and ecology converge. Throughout the semester we will effectively trouble ecology by critically examining the categories of race, gender, nature, place, and technology within a contemporary catalog of texts that we might call Black Ecoliterature. Central questions guiding the course include How do our notions of race, gender, and indigeneity inform our ideas of ecology? and In what ways does centering blackness and/ or black subjects shift our extant understandings of environmentalism?