Black to Nature: Pastoral Return and African American Culture - Hardcover

by Stefanie K. Dunning (Author)

In Black to Nature: Pastoral Return and African American Culture, author Stefanie K. Dunning considers both popular and literary texts that range from Beyoncé's Lemonade to Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones. These key works restage Black women in relation to nature. Dunning argues that depictions of protagonists who return to pastoral settings contest the violent and racist history that incentivized Black disavowal of the natural world. Dunning offers an original theoretical paradigm for thinking through race and nature by showing that diverse constructions of nature in these texts are deployed as a means of rescrambling the teleology of the Western progress narrative. In a series of fascinating close readings of contemporary Black texts, she reveals how a range of artists evoke nature to suggest that interbeing with nature signals a call for what Jared Sexton calls "the dream of Black Studies"--abolition.

Author Biography

Stefanie K. Dunning is associate professor of English at Miami University of Ohio. She is author of Queer in Black and White: Interraciality, Same Sex Desire, and Contemporary African American Culture. Her work has been published in African American Review, MELUS, Signs, and several other journals and anthologies. She sometimes publishes under the pen name Zeffie Gaines.