“Black Ecofeminism and Abolitionist Ecology”
A talk by Jennifer James
May 14, 4:00pm
EMU 146, Crater Lake Room North
 
 
 
 

Drawn from her book, Captive Ecologies: The Environmental Afterlives of Slavery, Professor James’s talk will discuss her theory of Black ecofeminist “bottoming,” an intersectional approach to thinking about Black environmental praxis, and Black abolitionist ecology, an anti-property, anti-dominion vein of environmentalism that seeks to complicate ideas of the commons which center property-owning as a vehicle of human and ecological liberation.

Jennifer James is Associate Professor at the George Washington University and author of A Freedom Bought with Blood: African American War Literature, the Civil War-World War II. Her new book, Captive Ecologies: The Environmental Afterlives of Slavery, a study of how the afterlife of enslavement in the form of racial capitalism has shaped the Black ecological imagination, is under review at Duke University Press. Her environmental work has been included in the journals American Literature, American Literary History, and Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities and the collections Environmental Criticism for the 21st Century and The Cambridge Companion to American Literature of The Civil War and Reconstruction. She is the President-elect of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists and serves on the editorial board for Regeneration: Environment, Art, Culture.